The number of natural disasters has been increasing in recent decades, and the amount of damage becomes enormous. To reduce the damage, it is crucial that people become more aware of disaster prevention and takes action for disaster prevention and mitigation. As disaster education to raise awareness, a method using virtual reality (VR) has been attractive because the VR disaster experience is more realistic than a video showing the scene of a disaster and requires less equipment than a simulated experience using a quake simulator. It can also reproduce disasters that are difficult to experience in reality, such as fire. However, in conventional VR disaster experience systems, it is possible to experience only a specific environment that the designer has selected and created in advance. The environment is often different from that in which users spend their everyday lives. Therefore, it was difficult to feel a sense of reality and fear that a disaster might actually occur. In addition, from the viewpoint of reviewing disaster countermeasures, there were few points that could be used as references. In order to solve this problem, the authors have developed a system that automatically creates a VR space that enables users to experience a disaster based on images captured by cameras. This system makes it very easy to experience disasters in the environment, which they spend everyday lives in, constructed from pictures taken by them. Moreover, it may raise awareness of disaster prevention. It is not clear, however, to what extent the experience of a disaster in a familiar environment is effective, or how the psychology of the experiencers changes when they experience a disaster in a familiar environment.The purpose of this study is therefore to evaluate whether the users’ awareness of disaster prevention improve when they experience the VR disaster experience in a familiar environment like their own room. In this study, earthquake and fire are treated as disasters to be experienced.In the experiment, participants were asked to take pictures of the room in which the participant spend their most of everyday lives, and to experience virtual earthquake and fire in the room created from the pictures and in the non-familiar environment. After experiencing each disaster experience environment, they were asked to answer a questionnaire about their awareness of disaster prevention, which included a sense of reality, a sense of fear, a sense of familiar environment, communication intention, disaster risk perception, anxiety and disaster prevention behavioral intention. The results were used to compare the effects of each disaster experience environment on the awareness of disaster prevention.The results of the evaluation experiment showed the possibility that the familiar environment can trigger participants to imagine that a disaster will actually happen to them, and can increase their awareness of disaster prevention. On the other hand, the results also suggested the possibility that participants are more likely to notice unnatural places in the experience such as objects’ movement in earthquake and the origin of fire because it was very familiar environment for them.

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IntroductionThe purpose of this study is to examine the worker’s motivation effect on intellectual concentration by an experiment and a cognitive process simulation. By utilizing the Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R) concept, it helps to understand the cognitive models of the different motivational condition. ACT-R is one of the prevalent cognitive architectures that mainly differ the cognitive process into production modules and declarative modules.Several studies have been investigating the human cognitive performance in respect of others factors such as working environments. Inspirited by previous studies, this study has explored the human motivational factors that might influence intellectual concentration. Additionally, exploring the differences in workers’ individual problem-solving strategy is one of the alluring factors in this study given the differences in motivational conditions.MethodsFive participants were recruited for the experiment the range of their ages between 18-22 years old as a pilot study. The simple summation mathematical task was given during the experiments and shows two numbers on the left side and right side of the monitor screen. They were asked to answer the problem by pressing the numerical keyboard and the answering time was automatically recorded on the experiment program. The eye gaze movements were recorded and analyzed during the experiments. In this study, the participants performed the task under two different motivational conditions. The first condition was set to create the urge to finish the task immediately which generates high motivation to finish the task as fast as they can. The other condition was set in a neutral condition which the participants could perform at their own pace without a rush. From this experiment, approximately 3000 answering time data and 900.000 frames of the eye gaze movement were gathered and analyzed.ResultsThe different motivational conditions influenced the user’s task performance, showing a statistical difference in the user’s answering time in a high motivational and neutral conditions (p < 0.01). The distribution of the answering time follows the log-normal distribution shapes shown by both conditions.The participants performed different strategies in the cognitive task. Following the ACT-R modules, in general, the identified eye gaze patterns are divided into 2 patterns. The first pattern follows the production rules: (1)find-left-number, (2)attend-left-number, (3)encode-left-number, (4)retrieve-left-number, (5)find-right-number, (6)attend-right-number, (7)encode-right-number, (8)waiting-for-start-back, (9)attend-start-back, summation, and (10)keyboard-click. On the other hand, the second pattern follows the production rules: (1)find-left-number, (2)attend-left-number, (3)encode-left-number, (4)retrieve-left-number, (5)find-right-number, (6)encode-right-number, (7)summation, keyboard-click, (8)waiting-for-start-back, and (9)attend-start-back.In the different motivational conditions, the pattern’s appearance is altered. For participants 1, 3, and 5 the second patterns were dominant during the high motivational condition. Some irregular patterns arouse in the last 5 minutes of the task. This condition might due to the degradation of the user’s cognitive performance when the user feels tired and it might be the time duration that affected their cognitive performance. The results of this study might enlighten future research on cognitive performance by proposing a new method of eye gaze pattern identification on ACT-R cognitive models.

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