Insight into evacuation from single-exit room in stress: Mice experiment

Abstract

The evacuation efficiency is influenced by different stressors like fire, earthquake, shooting and even evacuation drills. In this work, the single and collective evacuation experiments of empirical rodent were conducted under three stress levels (no stress, medium stress and high stress) from water. In individual experiments, the results indicate that high stress caused high-strung, whereas the evacuation time is longest under no stress condition. Compared with these two stress conditions, medium stress can generate stimulus but not high-strung for mice, which facilitates mice to evacuate more efficiently. In collective experiments, the mice interacted with each other during searching for the exit. Additionally, the higher stress makes mice more impatient, which can be observed from the frequent change of their movement directions when encountering others, and the medium stress conduces to the evacuation as well. The comparison of individual and collective behavior of mice can provide insight into interaction among pedestrians in a collective evacuation, and the findings are helpful for rapid and effective evacuation in emergencies.