Date: Wednesday, February 2 2022 @3:30PM -04:30PM
Title: Developing a cognitive approach to the study of human crowd dynamics from interdisciplinary perspectives
Location: Online
Speaker: Tarampi, Margaret
Abstract:
Most crowd-related disasters can be attributed to human behavior, or to the design of the built environment. The existing literature point to how visual factors, like crowd density, velocity fluctuations, and built structures all influence the average pedestrian’s risk within a crowd.
The study of collective animal behavior such as swarming insects or schooling fish has provided insights, methodologies, and tools for the study of human crowd behavior. Analytical and numerical models of self-organizing behavior can be used to find general principles that can link observed behaviors with basic sensory processing mechanisms. In the context of panic or uncertain conditions, what effect do perceptual, behavioral, and social factors have on individual behavior in evacuation crowd dynamics? Based on the findings from the models, we employed a simple choice experiment in real and virtual worlds to identify how visual features (such as group size and walking speed) influence peoples’ directional decisions in groups of varying size and under varying conditions.
Subsequent studies will determine how architectural design can either alleviate or aggravate crowd evacuations.
Bio:
Margaret R. Tarampi, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at University of Hartford. Her Spatial Cognition and Physical Environments (SCaPE) Laboratory investigates the cognitive mechanisms that underlie space perception and spatial cognition in select populations including visually impaired individuals and spatial experts such as dancers and architects. Other research interests include spatial thinking, perception and action, perspective taking, crowd dynamics, joint action, and kinesthetic imagery.
Tarampi received her Bachelor of Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University. Her interests in the effect of architecture on quality of life then brought her to the American Institute of Architects (AIA) National Headquarters in Washington DC and then to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla CA. Tarampi received her Master of Science and Ph.D. in Cognition and Neural Science from University of Utah. Following her graduate training, she was a Junior Research Fellow in the SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind and a Research Associate in the Center for Spatial Studies both at University of California Santa Barbara. She is also an accomplished visual artist whose work has been displayed in exhibitions nationally and internationally.