Strike probability judgments and protective action recommendations in a dynamic hurricane tracking task

Abstract

This experiment assessed the strike probability (p s ) judgments and protective action recommendations (PARs) of students playing the roles of county emergency managers during four different hurricane scenarios. The results show that participants' p s judgments (1) increased for target cities (projected landfall locations) and generally decreased for adjacent cities and remote cities as hurricanes approached landfall, and (2) were significantly correlated with PARs, but (3) were not consistent with the requirement that Rp s \ 1.0 for a set of non-exhaustive events. Participants also (4) chose more PARs as hurricanes approached landfall, especially for the counties to which they participants were assigned, but (5) failed to choose as many PARS as appropriate, especially evacuating areas at risk of hurricane impacts. Overall, the results suggest that participants were able to utilize the available hurricane information to make reasonable p s judgments, but failed to make the appropriate inferences about the significance of those p s judgments. This suggests a need for further research on people's interpretation of threat information, development of better training manuals on hurricane evacuation decision making, and better hurricane information displays to guide people's responses to hurricane threats.

Process Tracing Analysis of Hurricane Information Displays

“…After searching the display screen, participants also provided judgments of strike probability for six cities roughly equally spaced around the Gulf of Mexico from Tampa to Tampico and checked which of 11 different protective actions they would recommend for their jurisdictions—ranging from opening the county Emergency Operations Center to evacuating all five hurricane risk areas. These data are reported elsewhere …”

“…This study focuses on the PADM's sequence from warning messages through predecision processes, threat perceptions, and protective action decision making to information search (the pattern of protective action decisions is addressed in Wu et al .) . This study manipulates several within‐subjects (multiple forecast advisories and multiple hurricane scenarios) and between‐subjects (multiple hurricane sequences and different decisionmaker locations) factors in a factorial design.…”

Decision Science Perspectives on Hurricane Vulnerability: Evidence from the 2010–2012 Atlantic Hurricane Seasons

“…The findings from two lab-based studies by Wu et al [37,38] support the finding that people tend to focus on the forecast track, gleaning little information from the rest of the graphic. Other challenges with maps include confusion between probability maps and scenario maps [39] and misjudgment of risk when polygons are used to show risk zones [40,41].…”

A tutorial on DynaSearch: A Web-based system for collecting process-tracing data in dynamic decision tasks

“…After each click, DynaSearch identifies the click's sequence number and stores the amount of time that the object that has been clicked is viewed (the length of time the mouse button is depressed) and the page locations of the mouse at the beginning and end of the click (i.e., the object identifier). Figure 3 shows an information search page tableau based on a page used in the Wu et al (2015aWu et al ( , 2015b experiment. As the figure indicates, information search pages support three types of assets-text boxes, tables, and image boxes.…”

“…An image can also be associated with a table-formatted legend box, which allows the participant to view systematically related images by clicking on different legend box cells. As in the Wu et al (2015aWu et al ( , 2015b hurricane-tracking experiment, there could be a hurricane-tracking map as a background image, and the legend box could be a table that has rows corresponding to different superimposed images (current/past hurricane center positions, forecast track, uncertainty cone, wind swath) and columns corresponding to different time periods (Day 1 forecast through Day 5 forecast). Image boxes can also be used to display other types of graphical information, such as plots of parameters over time.…”