Analys av vägledande markeringars påverkan på utrymmande personers vägval med hjälp av eyetracking

Sammanfattning: The use of exit signage is legally regulated even thought there is a lack of knowledge regarding the extent to which they help. It’s therefore of interest to study if people actually look at them in an evacuation situation. This thesis examines whether people observe exit signage, whereas three different sign types are tested to conclude differences. The three tested types were normal, illuminated, and blinking signs. Eyetracking glasses were used during the experiments to examine the gaze of the user. To evaluate the different signs’ effect on evacuees, evacuation experiments were designed. Volunteers were recruited and unknowing that they were taking part in evacuation experiments they were left alone to play the classic arcade game Tetris while equipped with the eyetracking glasses. During these experiments, they were left in a completely unfamiliar environment, isolated from social influences. The place where the experiments carried out had two corridors with plenty of adjacent rooms and three stairwells leading to the floor, connected to both corridors. After a while an evacuation alarm sounded and the evacuee’s behavior was examined. The participant could then choose to evacuate with help from the exit signage, or to find the same way out from which they came in, disregarding signage. Afterwards, the evacuee was asked to fill out a survey with questions about the experiment. Results from both the eyetracking device as well as surveys were obtained. A total of 22 people decided to evacuate through the corridor to the right while 39 people evacuated through the left corridor, even though all participants were led to the experiment through the left corridor. The majority of evacuees decided to evacuate through the stairwell closest to them, while only a few evacuated through the other stairwells. This might seem peculiar, since all participants arrived to the floor through the furthermost stairwell. About half of the participants were unable to correctly reproduce their way of egress. One reason for this could be that the evacuees perceived the built environment at repetitive and thus lost their ability to orient themselves. If an evacuee left the experiment room and noticed a sign, the average time they fixated their gaze upon signs was measured and analyzed. Blinking signs were shown to make people look at them for a significant longer duration compared to normal or illuminated signs. No differences were found between the signs regarding the time until the first fixation. It could however be shown that taller persons noticed signs more often compared to shorter persons. During the initial state of the evacuation, the eyetracking films showed a result that partially matched the results from the surveys. The films indicated that people tended to search for others while the evacuees themselves claimed that they were looking for signs. This difference might originate in the tendency to “answer right” depending on what the respondent thinks the researchers want. This behavior likely incused other answers in the surveys as well. In conclusion, the main questions of the thesis were answered: • Approximately 80 % of the evacuees noticed signs on their way out and roughly half of those decided to follow them. • The different signs were shown not to affect the tendency to observe or follow them. More research is needed to investigate how different exit signage can impact an evacuation situation.