Publications

This paper addresses the pathways for future training and education for emergency managers in the United States (US) to engage with climate literacy, drawing from the study Enhancing Capacity in Adult Climate Literacy: Investigating Sustainability Mindsets in the US Emergency Management Profession. Findings will be presented based on a collective case study that was conducted to understand how climate change education can meet the learning needs of emergency management professionals who must prepare for, and adapt to, the impacts of climate change on communities throughout the US. In this paper, the definition of "climate change" centers on anthropogenic climate change and, more specifically, the impact of human activities on the atmosphere's chemical composition. The exploratory collective case study involved six (N = 6) certified emergency management professionals currently practicing in the US as the study's key informants (KIs). In addition to the information collected from the six KIs, a survey was distributed to a larger sample (N = 56) to collect broader information from additional emergency managers to amplify and contrast the data collected from the KI interviews.

In recent years, Texas has experienced intensified damage and increasing costs from natural disasters due to climate change. This highlights the need to evaluate ongoing information technology (IT) initiatives that can guide better preparedness and mitigation strategies. In this paper, we establish a baseline by showcasing the benefits of humanitarian free and open-source software in addressing critical challenges faced by IT-driven relief efforts during Hurricane Harvey. Additionally, flooding has emerged as Texas' most pressing disaster, prompting a complete examination of existing IT, data, and free and open-source software initiatives focused on both inland and coastal flooding. Finally, we will analyze the most promising current initiative and offer insights into future developments.

This study investigates the dual role of citizen interpreters in addressing emergency language gaps during crises, combining social capital theory and crisis ethics. Through comparative case studies of coronavirus disease 2019 responses in Montreal's multilingual communities and Hurricane Ida relief efforts within Louisiana's Haitian-Cajun networks, this research identifies three core tensions: the paradox of relational proximity, trade-offs between immediacy and accuracy in terminology translation, and challenges in scaling informal volunteer networks. The study introduces a hybrid quality control model integrating three components: (1) rapid crisis terminology training to bridge institutional-lay knowledge gaps, (2) peer review circles for contextual meaning-making, eg, negotiating "heat exhaustion" in Punjabi dialects, and (3) institutional mentorship to resolve ethical dilemmas, eg, disclosing shelter capacities without triggering trauma. By operationalizing Putnam's bridging/bonding capital and Bourdieu's cultural capital, the model reconciles grassroots agility with professional accountability, demonstrating that citizen interpreters' cultural embeddedness-when systematically supported-can transform emergency language services into participatory practices of language justice. Findings highlight the need for crisis communication frameworks that prioritize both interpretive accuracy and community trust, offering theoretical insights into the sociology of translation and practical guidelines for disaster preparedness.

The main goal of emergency preparedness is the creation of processes and procedures focused on the preservation of human life. One of the leading contributors to loss of life during multi-casualty incidents (MCIs) is the lack of adequate planning, preparation, and simulation. According to a 2017 study, approximately 15 percent of human-caused mass casualty events, with over 10 fatalities, are mass shootings. These events can occur under various circumstances and take place in a wide range of venues, such as schools, offices, and outdoor events, presenting a wide range of unique challenges. To address these more effectively through procedures and policies, more research is need, including simulation and creation of digital twins, all of which have proven beneficial in gathering insights. This is especially true when conducting drills that are not practical or possible, as they do not allow for the multitude of responses to active shooter events. Current research models in use today treat the victims of these simulations either as "killed" or "unaffected." This binary approach is suitable for many simulations when the timeliness of interventions is of no concern, but it does not allow for higher-fidelity simulation, which may be beneficial when developing response and safety protocols for a specific event or specific facility. Simulating physiological decline is beneficial to improving realism and will lead to response protocol improvement. Increased fidelity can help assess the effects of active bystanders voluntarily and opportunistically providing medical first response. Furthermore, this allows us to assess the response of others who have different primary functions during those events, such as the School Resource Officer, or a tactical medic attached to Special Weapons And Tactics during the process of building clearing. Last but not least, this type of simulation can inform and improve how a lockdown is conducted. In mass shooting events, uncontrolled bleeding is often the proximate cause of death for victims. Several data sources were consulted to simulate exsanguination, which helped quantify and describe blood loss based on different types of injuries. This work summarizes our findings and provides a practical guide for the implementation of these findings. In additional papers, the authors cover the process of blood loss mitigation and provide a reference library for implementation in AnyLogic. This research focuses on the simulation of the initial injury and bleeding control mitigation, efforts which by historical context are limited to the first hour of treatment, the so-called golden hour of trauma management. The circulatory system is complex and has several compensatory mechanisms. The efficiency and timing of each are predictable but have some variability to every individual. This work mainly focuses on the primary effectors and simulates the overall process defined by statistical data from peer-reviewed studies. Ultimately, this work presents a quantitative model of blood loss as a function of time, injury placement, and individual victim variability such as age, weight, and gender, which are suitable for computer simulation. Data were validated using empirical datasets. While no model is perfect, the authors propose a common framework for future simulation work that different researchers can use on a known standard deterministic model. This allows for better control for the blood loss process variables while testing other hypotheses related to emergency response for similar events.

Charismatic leadership has long been attributed to a select few individuals with exceptional personal qualities, often described as possessing a mysterious and extraordinary capability. The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge presents a case study of leadership during an emergency. Crises such as this not only affect organizational effectiveness but also shape leaders' behavior and influence the outcomes of their actions. The increasing frequency of natural disasters in the United States, with an average of 18-billion-dollar climate-related events annually in recent years, provides growing opportunities for leadership emergence. In the case of the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse, Maryland Governor Wes Moore demonstrated charismatic leadership, earning public recognition for his response efforts. According to Judge, self-confidence is one of the few traits consistently associated with leadership emergence, closely linking it to charisma and the ability to attract and inspire others. Applying Judge's theory and those of others, this study argues that charisma plays a critical role in shaping how leaders are portrayed and remembered by both the public and the media. Through a qualitative analysis of Governor Wes Moore's communications, this study explores the lasting impact of charismatic leadership during emergency management situations.

The ability to quickly and precisely follow another person's gaze reflects critical evolutionary mechanisms underlying social interactions, such as attention modulation and the prediction of others' future actions. Recent studies show that observers use another person's gaze direction and peripheral scene information to make anticipatory saccades toward the gaze goal. However, it remains unclear how these eye movements are influenced by complex features of natural scenes, such as a foveal gazer, multiple peripheral gaze goals, and the relative distance between gazer and goal. We presented dynamic stimuli (videos) of real-world scenes with or without a gazer shifting their head to gaze at other individuals (gaze goals). Participants were instructed to search for a specific target individual in the videos while their eye movements were recorded. We measured the accuracy of the first saccade in locating the gaze goal. First, we found that the absence of a foveal gazer significantly increased saccade error, but only when the goal was at least approximately 9 degrees of visual angle from the initial fixation. First saccade amplitude and onset latency were higher in the gazer-present condition. Second, when there were multiple potential gaze goals in the periphery, the first saccade was directed to the individual closer to the initial fixation (gazer) location. Finally, the presence of multiple peripheral gaze goals shortened saccade latencies and increased the frequency of anticipatory saccades made before the gazer completed their head movement. These findings extend our understanding of gaze following in complex, naturalistic scenes and inform theories of attention and real-world decision-making.

Multisensory information can help resolve perceptual ambiguity in situations such as the alternating visual experience during binocular rivalry. Across four experiments, participants viewed dichoptically presented spiky and round rival targets while simultaneously touching spiky, neutral, or round shapes in three-dimensional (3D) printed form. The primary aim was to investigate the influence of visuotactile shape congruence in the curvature dimension. In addition, the roles of voluntary action and spatial colocalization on successful crossmodal integration were investigated. Voluntary action was tested between active touch (Experiments 1 and 2) and passive touch (Experiments 3 and 4) conditions. Visual stimulus type differed between rapid successions of 3D-rendered images (Experiments 1 and 3) and real-world video recordings (Experiments 2 and 4), with the latter involving bodily cues to promote visuotactile colocalization. In general, the results showed that tactile shape congruence can lead to relative dominance of the corresponding visual target, especially when visuotactile colocalization was encouraged with video recordings as visual targets. The results suggest beneficial effects of crossmodal shape congruence on disambiguation, which seems to be generally comparable between the two modes of active versus passive touch. Using 3D stimuli and including free voluntary action, the study provides novel and connecting insights into the naturalistic object processing behavior of humans.

When visual input is uncertain, visual perception is biased toward the stimulation from the recent past. We can attend to stimuli either endogenously based on an internal decision or exogenously, triggered by an external event. Here, we wondered whether serial dependencies are selective for the attentional mode which we draw to stimuli. We studied overt attention shifts: saccades and recorded either motor error correction or visual orientation judgments. In Experiment 1, we assessed sensorimotor serial dependencies, focusing on how the postsaccadic error influences subsequent saccade amplitudes. In Experiment 2, we evaluated visual serial dependencies by measuring orientation judgments, contingent on the type of saccade performed. In separate sessions, participants performed either only voluntary saccades or only delayed saccades, or both saccade types alternated within a session. Our results revealed that sensorimotor serial dependencies were selective for the saccade type performed. When voluntary saccades had been performed in the preceding trial, serial dependencies were much stronger in the current trial if voluntary instead of delayed saccades were executed. In contrast, visual serial dependencies were not influenced by the type of saccade performed. Our findings reveal that shifts in exogenous and endogenous attention differentially impact sensorimotor serial dependencies, but visual serial dependencies remain unaffected.

Saccadic choice studies have shown that humans initiate faster saccades toward faces than other visual categories. Here, we tested whether the saccadic advantage for faces observed in past studies is partly due to stimuli being typically presented along the horizontal meridian (HM). Our previous work suggests that the radial bias along the HM facilitates access to the horizontal structure of faces, which optimally drives human face-specialized processing. We expected to corroborate the saccadic advantage for faces along the HM, where the radial bias facilitates access to horizontal content, and to observe a reduction of this advantage along the vertical meridian (VM), especially in participants showing a strong horizontal tuning for face recognition. Fifty participants performed a saccadic choice task targeting faces or vehicles presented at 15° eccentricity along the HM and VM. We also assessed the strength of the radial bias and the horizontal tuning for face identity recognition in each individual. As expected, saccades were faster and more accurate toward faces than vehicles; they were also faster along the HM than the VM. Contrary to our hypothesis, the saccadic face advantage did not differ between meridians, suggesting the robustness of face saccadic advantage. However, the saccadic face advantage along the VM correlated with the strength of the horizontal tuning of face identity recognition. Additionally, the radial bias predicted saccade latency toward faces along the HM. These findings indicate that low-level radial biases and high-level face-specialized mechanisms independently contribute to distinct functional aspects of the ultra-fast saccadic responses toward faces.

Eye movements and spatial attention are both crucial to visual perception. Orienting gaze to objects of interest is achieved by voluntary saccades (VSs) driven by internal goals or reactive saccades (RSs) triggered automatically by sudden environmental changes. Both VSs and RSs are known to undergo plastic adjustments to maintain their accuracy throughout life, driven by saccadic adaptation processes. Spatial attention enhances visual processing within a restricted zone, and it can be shifted voluntarily following our internal goals (endogenous) or automatically in response to unexpected changes in sensory stimulation (exogenous). Despite the widely accepted notion that saccadic and attention shifts are governed by distinct but highly interconnected systems, the relationship between saccadic adaptation and spatial attention is still unclear. To address this relationship, we conducted two experiments combining modified versions of the double-step adaptation paradigm and the attention-orienting paradigm. Experiment 1 tested the effect of shifting exogenous attention by a tactile cue near or away from the saccade's target on RS adaptation. Experiment 2 also used tactile cueing but now to investigate the effect of shifting endogenous attention on VS adaptation. Although we were unable to obtain direct evidence for an effect of spatial attention on saccadic adaptation, correlation analyses indicated that both the rate and magnitude of saccadic adaptation were positively correlated with the allocation of attention toward the saccade target and negatively correlated with attention directed away from the target.