Research on the Path Integration Behavior of Firefighters in the Dark

Abstract

Firefighters often need to complete combat missions in dark environments, such as finding trapped people, exploring unknown rooms and forming corresponding internal fire maps. The judgment of spatial orientation is especially important in these tasks because it can be effectively optimized. Rescue strategy to improve the personal protection level of firefighters. Therefore. this study conducted a 2 × 2 × 2×3 inter-group experiment on the spatial orientation of firefighters in a dark environment based on posture, personnel composition, difficulty level of the scene and memory demand level. The subject needs to pass through the 5 × 14 rectangular space clockwise along the wall and stop at the measurement points on the other three sides except the side of the departure position. The direction judgment is performed by measuring the oral report angle of the subject and the actual arm pointing angle. The posture is divided into upright and half-turn. The composition of the personnel is divided into one person and two people. Scene difficulty is divided into simple and complex. A complicated and simple way to distinguish is to increase the edge of the scene by placing obstacles on the corners of the rectangle. The memory requirement level is divided into three levels: low, medium, and high. The experimental results show that the complexity of the scene significantly affects the azimuth backlash error of the subject, the complex scene error is higher, and the simple scene error is lower. The composition of the personnel greatly affected the azimuth adaptation error. In the case of a group of 2 people, the orientation judgment error is lower. The level of posture and memory requirements did not significantly affect the azimuth anaphora error. The results of this study can provide a reference for firefighters in space cognitive design.

Y. Zhang—Associate researcher and doctor, mainly focuses on human reliability, human-computer interaction and astronaut selection and training.