Search

Tsunami risk is dynamic as all elements (i.e., hazard, exposure, and vulnerability) have long- and short-term variability. The short-term variability is mainly due to the variation of human exposure during evacuation. Reliable evacuation modelling requires the adoption of agent-based frameworks that may be complicated to set up; therefore, several parameters must be defined appropriately. Once the agent-based model is deemed reliable, it is possible to integrate the agent-based evacuation modelling with stochastic tsunami hazard scenarios to compute the tsunami risk in terms of the number of people affected by the tsunami during the evacuation. We present the case of the Saga district of Kuroshio Town in Kochi Prefecture, Japan, where the anticipated tsunami from future tsunami from the Nankai-Tonankai subduction zone is very high, exceeding 20 m. For agent-based modelling, MATSim software is used. Stochastic earthquake source models for the Nankai-Tonankai tsunami are generated to perform stochastic tsunami inundation simulations. Subsequently, agent-based tsunami evacuation modelling is performed by considering four types of transportation modes. The stochastic tsunami simulations and agent-based evacuation modelling results are integrated to estimate the risk. Such an integrated framework is used to recommend tsunami fatality risk mitigation strategies in tsunami-prone regions. Results show that up to ~1,000 out of 2200 residents may get affected if car is the sole evacuation mode. Therefore, the coastal community is recommended to evacuate on foot. The developed integrated method can be extended to consider possible road blockages due to debris due to intense shaking., The 28th IUGG General Assembly (IUGG2023) (Berlin 2023)

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a clinical condition with a high risk of progression to dementia. One of its most common consequences is a difficulty in people's ability to remember past information and events, caused by an impairment of their long-term episodic memory system (Winblad et al. 2004; Dubois et al. 2007; Petersen et al. 2014). MCI may also damage people’s ability to follow and understand a situation as it unfolds and to recall it soon after it happens. While many studies have demonstrated the long-term memory episodic difficulties that adults with MCI experience (Della Sala et al. 2005; Irish et al. 2011; Walsh et al. 2014), there is a paucity of research investigating if this impairment also extends to their comprehension and immediate memory. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to test if individuals with MCI, who experience memory difficulties, also show problems in comprehending ongoing information and in recalling it immediately afterwards. The present study is based on a prominent theory of event comprehension, called “Event segmentation theory” (EST; Zacks & Tversky, 2001; Zacks et al. 2007). According to this theory, when people experience an event (e.g., listening to the TV news), they create and maintain a description of the current situation in their immediate memory for a short period of time, and then they transfer this information in their long-term memory when they detect a change (called “event boundary”) in the ongoing situation (e.g., the news switches to a different story). Detecting event changes helps people to ascribe those happenings to distinct situations and facilitates their storage in memory and their subsequent retrieval. Our study will test this theory by using a task that probes the detection and memory of event changes. The task will require participants to listen to short stories containing two separate activities (e.g., looking for car keys then making a sandwich; change of events, multiple situations) and equally long stories containing just one activity (e.g., looking for car keys; no change of events, single situation), and to recall them immediately and after an hour delay. In line with the existing literature (e.g., Della Sala et al. 2005; Irish et al. 2011; Walsh et al. 2014), adults with MCI who typically experience memory problems, should find it difficult to recall an event after a long delay, regardless of whether the event describes a single situation or multiple situations. However, MCI individuals may also show difficulties in comprehending and recalling an event immediately after it happens, if that event describes multiple situations. This is because the switch between different situations requires the ability to detect the change of situation and safely store the previous situation in long-term memory, in order to build a new description of the current situation. MCI individuals might find it difficult to detect changes between situations, as even healthy older adults typically show less agreement than younger adults in establishing when event changes occur, while watching movies or reading narratives (Zacks et al. 2006; Kurby and Zacks, 2011; Magliano et al. 2012). Difficulties in detecting event changes should impair their ability to store an event in memory and retrieve it, even immediately after its presentation. By contrast, MCI individuals should be able to comprehend and recall immediately more simple events describing a single situation that does not involve changes.

Our senses continuously receive a massive amount of information from the world around us, yet we are almost always able to make sense of what is happening, with little effort. This likely happens because we have a natural tendency to chunk experience into meaningful units. These units have been called event or situation models, as they describe the key elements of an event or situation, such as, what is happening, where, when, and who is involved. Event boundaries occur when the current event model no longer adequately summarizes what is happening and a new one is required. The structuring of continuous information using event models has profound effects on how we perceive, comprehend, and remember our experiences. At the level of brain activity measured using fMRI, it has been shown that event models are associated with relatively specific patterns of activity which are present during event perception and recall. These event-specific activity patterns may reflect the neural representation of event models and have been shown to be relatively stable during events and shift at event boundaries. The mechanisms that underpin event segmentation and the factors that influence the neural representation of events are not well understood. Changes in multiple dimensions, like locations, people, their actions, have been proven to affect the way in which individuals segment events (e.g., Zacks et al. 2009; Magliano and Zacks, 2011; Huff et al. 2014), and which brain regions are involved in event processing (Speer et al. 2007, 2009; Yarkoni et al. 2008; Zacks et al. 2011; Ezzyat & Davachi, 2011). Therefore, the main aim of the present study is to clarify what information is included in the neural representation of events. Specifically, we will examine the possibility that the intentions, actions and goals of the people present in a situation play a critical role in event perception at the behavioural and neural level. We will test whether changes to the narrative of short stories, corresponding to shifts in the actions and goals of the protagonists, result in changes to the neural representation of the stories. Other changes within the stories, such as the locations and people present, will be controlled. We will use custom written short stories describing life-like situations. Human participants will listen to these stories while being scanned with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), and their memory for them will be tested after scanning.