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Tunnel Vision Hypothesis: Cognitive Factor Affecting Crowd Evacuation Decisions

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Abstract

Numerous studies have found the cognitive factors regarding crowd evacuation behaviors to be significant. However, because objective data are lacking, the exact effects of these factors have yet to be clarified. A video clip captured during the Great East Japan Earthquake involving 48 people in a meeting room gave researchers a unique opportunity to access data that allowed a numerical analysis of evacuation behaviors. Using the video clip, researchers discovered a unique evacuation behavior; the decision to either flee or drop was determined by a person’s distance from the exit. Simulations using the evacuation decision model were conducted. The evacuation decision model is a model of herd behaviors that occur during evacuations, and the aforementioned unique evacuation behavior was successfully reproduced in the model. However, the simulation settings seemed to be oversimplified (e.g., number of agents, initial arrangement of the agents, disregarded physical constraints, etc.). This study aimed to reproduce the diagonal spatial pattern of evacuation decisions that emerged using new simulation settings that are more representative of the situation depicted in the video. The diagonal spatial pattern can only be reproduced within the limited ranges of two parameters that define the shape of the visual field of an agent—an autonomous entity in the simulation. The analysis of simulation results revealed that during evacuations, the visual field of an agent was narrowed to 20\(^{\circ }\) with a relatively long range and led to a hypothesis that people undergoing evacuations were subject to tunnel vision, a cognitive effect in which excessive cognitive demands, fear, or mental stress narrows visual fields of people.

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Notes

  1. https://www.fnn.jp/common/311/articles/201103110012.html.

  2. In the case of the result shown in Fig. 6, the value of O was 66.47.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Mr. Kei Marukawa for his comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Editage (www.editage.com) for the English language editing.

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  1. Intelligent Systems Laboratory, Secom Co., Ltd, Tokyo, Japan

    Akira Tsurushima

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This article is part of the topical collection “Agents and Artificial Intelligence” guest edited by Jaap van den Herik, Ana Paula Rocha and Luc Steels.

Appendix

Appendix

The following table shows the results of the parameter searches using black-box simulation in descending order of \({\bar{O}}\). Searches were conducted 20 times with different initial points.

Table 5 Results of black-box optimization
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Tsurushima, A. Tunnel Vision Hypothesis: Cognitive Factor Affecting Crowd Evacuation Decisions. SN COMPUT. SCI. 3, 332 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42979-022-01217-7

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