Fire Safety Science Digital Archive

We attempted to clarify how performance shaping factors and visual cognitive tasks affected the time taken to perform a way-finding activity in a maze. We performed way-finding experiments on humans subjects in an underground maze, and found that the use of a visual guiding system halved the time required for way-finding. The experiments were performed under dim conditions. The luminance at floor level during the experiments was l-9 lx. Without an escape-guiding system, some subjects mistook dim corners of the maze for dead ends, and turned back the way they had come. with the aid of a visual guiding system, no subject lost his or her way. By considering the visual cognitive tasks needed to negotiate the maze, we developed a relationship between PSFs and way-finding activity in a dim environment, and proposed a possibility of PSF-based assessment for way-finding difficulty. Poor 'quality of interface' and Poor 'environment' increased the number of visual cognitive tasks required to negotiate the maze and simply extended the 'time to perform'. Only when the best information assistance was given in the environment did the number of visual cognitive tasks required ('procedure required') decrease.