Rapid information integration in support of situational awareness and spatial behaviour

Situational awareness and spatial behaviour are highly dependent on the reliability of perceived environmental stimuli and on any pre-conceptions or expectations (e.g. mental maps) about the environment. Robots, drones or body-worn topography-scanning technologies (e.g. LIDAR) are being developed to assist humans in safety-critical emergency situations in dark/smoky/contaminated environments. This project aims to (1) understand how humans (including those in the emergency services) combine information from perception, memory and technological sources to engender situational awareness, and thereby (2) support spatial behaviour.
Members of the emergency services (e.g., firefighters) can now be provided topographical information or form an expectation of a building's internal layout prior to entering it. They may have had little time to build trust in or establish the reliability of such 'priors' and their breathing apparatus duration is at most 20 minutes after they enter a smoke-filled building. Under such pressures, human resilience relies on refined standard operating procedures and practices to safeguard them against conflicting recalled and perceived information. The project aims to establish how the degrees of spatial information degradation, the amount/reliability/complexity of prior information provided, and live access to new information, contribute to spatial behaviour. As new assistive technologies emerge in support of incident command and fire crews, how can new, potentially complex information be effectively communicated without further increasing a firefighter's cognitive load?