Abstract

     Decision making is a core cognitive process of human behaviour that is often affected by stress. Whilst we make several decisions on a daily basis, firefighters in particular are called to make important decisions in a split second and within life-threatening settings. Stress can therefore impact their ability to perform and carry out their job. The implications of stress are similarly important in other settings requiring high-vigilance. In this paper, we aim to contribute to efforts to better train firefighters in decision making in stressful situations through a serious game solution. The game was designed based on the Stress Exposure Training (SET) approach and in accordance with typical stressors identified in the literature. Those were then mapped to relevant game mechanics. The evaluation of the resulting game was twofold: A. to assess its ability to increase participants’ stress level, and B. to investigate whether decision making performance would be improved for participants under stress. The proposed framework and the prototype were evaluated through empirical research that consisted of the participants’ self-reported stress levels using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for Adults (STAI) and the participants’ physiological measurements, namely galvanic skin response (GSR) and heart rate (HR). Our results demonstrate the potential of serious games to assist towards training of firefighters to make better decisions under stressful situations. Our findings are of wider importance as they contribute to ongoing efforts to improve decision making under stress in a variety of settings and scenarios.

Introduction

     We make hundreds of choices everyday. It is estimated that an adult makes approximately 35,000 conscious decisions each day (Sahakian and LaBuzetta, 2013) in various settings including, but not limited to, personal and professional practice. Decision making is considered a core cognitive process of human behaviour and can be defined as the process of choosing an option or an action from a set of alternatives based on criteria or strategies (Wang, Wang, Patel, Patel, 2006, Wilson, Keil, 2001).

     It is common that many decisions are often made under stressful situations (Starcke and Brand, 2012). The Mental Health Foundation defines stress as “the feeling of being overwhelmed or unable to cope with mental or emotional pressure”, which is triggered as a result of experiencing something new or unexpected (Mental Health Foundation, 2021). This is the definition we adopt in this work and we particularly focus on the emotional (physiological) responses to environmental and emotional pressures.

     Research has shown that there is an association between stress and decision making, which is often of a negative nature (Galvan, Rahdar, 2013, Staal, 2004, Starcke, Wolf, Markowitsch, Brand, 2008). Indeed, past work by Starcke and Brand (2012) identified that the effects of stress on decision making can have a lasting impact to public health by increasing the risk for unhealthy decisions, such as smoking, drinking or an unhealthy diet. Similarly, stress can have a negative impact on situations of vigilance such as natural disasters, fire or war which can be life threatening, as they require a person to make decisions in quick succession to avoid potential catastrophic consequences (Williams-Bell et al., 2015). It is therefore evident that making decisions under stress can and often leads to undesirable results such as increased distraction and increases in reaction time due to hurried decision making (Driskell et al., 1999).

Concluding discussion

     In this paper we presented a novel serious game that was developed to assist towards efforts focusing on training for fire evacuation and making better decisions under stressful vigilance situations. An empirical experiment was reported which investigated its ability to initially increase stress levels and examine whether participant decision making performance would be improved under stress. The results indicated that our serious game successfully managed to increase participants stress levels through its gameplay and implemented scenario (Tables 4 and Table 5, Fig. 7 and 8). These results are confirmed both through self-assessment and collected physiological measurements (HR and GSR). Accordingly, participants’ decision making performance improved through repetitive exposure to the game scenario (Fig. 9) which is in line with past research discussing that stressors that are repeated have been associated with changes in decision making-related brain regions (McEwen, 2007). An interesting finding that also arose from our results is that participants tended to visit the room that was closest to their last visited room regardless of the risk values in the briefing (Fig. 10). This demonstrated a decision making behaviour that is consistent with past work on the mere-exposure effect (Zajonc, 2001) which indicates that people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them.