ABSTRACT
CIPER – Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Human Performance, Faculty of Human Kinetics - Technical University of Lisbon, Estrada da Costa,1499-002 Cruz
Quebrada - Dafundo, Portugal
Understanding and predicting people’s displacement movement is particularly important to avoid wayfinding problems as well as to improve egress in emergency situation within complex buildings (e.g., hospitals, convention centers, subway stations and university campus). Environmental cues (i.e., affordances) can act as attractiveness factor which can influence some decisions taken by the visitors while choosing what route to follow. The study of eye movement can be an interesting approach to examine the influence of environmental cues about people´s decisiontaking. Therefore, this pilot study aims to investigate the use of eye movement analysis to understand the association between decision-taking during an emergency egress and environmental affordances. For this, a non-immersive virtual-reality (VR)-based methodology was adopted, involving the projection of images in a wallscreen. To collect the users’ responses, a constant stimulus method combined with a two-forced choices method was used. The results obtained, allow us to conclude that eye movement analysis may be used to investigate the association between decision-taking in an egress task and environmental affordances.
