Civil and Environmental Engineering, Imperial College London, London, UK.
School of the Built Environment, Massey University, Palmerston North, New Zealand.
Sci Rep. 2024 Mar 22;14(1):6892. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-55253-9.
Modern experiments investigating human behaviour in emergencies are often implemented in virtual reality (VR), due to the increased experimental control and improved ethical viability over physical reality (PR). However, there remain questions regarding the validity of the results obtained from these environments, and no full validation of VR experiments has yet appeared. This study compares the results of two sets of experiments (in VR and PR paradigms) investigating behavioural responses to knife-based hostile aggressors. This study quantitatively analyses these results to ascertain whether the different paradigms generate different responses, thereby assessing the use of virtual reality as a data generating paradigm for emergencies. The results show that participants reported almost identical psychological responses. This study goes on to identify minimal differences in movement responses across a range of predictors, noting a difference in responses between genders. As a result, this study concludes that VR can produce similarly valid data as physical experiments when investigating human behaviour in hostile emergencies, and that it is therefore possible to conduct realistic experimentation through VR environments while retaining confidence in the resulting data. This has major implications for the future of this type of research, and furthermore suggests that VR experimentation should be performed for both existing and new critical infrastructure to understand human responses in hostile scenarios.
现代研究人类在紧急情况下的行为的实验通常在虚拟现实（VR）中进行，因为它比物理现实（PR）具有更高的实验控制和更好的伦理可行性。然而，对于从这些环境中获得的结果的有效性仍然存在疑问，并且还没有出现对 VR 实验的全面验证。本研究比较了两组实验（VR 和 PR 范式）的结果，这些实验研究了对基于刀具的敌对攻击者的行为反应。本研究对这些结果进行了定量分析，以确定不同的范式是否会产生不同的反应，从而评估虚拟现实作为紧急情况数据生成范式的使用。结果表明，参与者报告了几乎相同的心理反应。本研究进一步确定了在一系列预测因素下运动反应的微小差异，注意到性别之间的反应差异。因此，本研究得出结论，当研究敌对紧急情况下的人类行为时，VR 可以与物理实验一样产生同样有效的数据，因此可以通过 VR 环境进行现实实验，同时对产生的数据保持信心。这对这种类型的研究的未来具有重大影响，此外还表明，应该对现有的和新的关键基础设施进行 VR 实验，以了解人类在敌对场景中的反应。
