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NFB documents psychology of getting lost |
Dr. Donald Heth (l) with Dr. Dan Montello and NFB crew |
What's the first thing you do when you realize you're lost? Panic? Look for a landmark, run in circles, maybe check your watch? It's a crucial question for psychologist Dr. Ed Cornell, who studies lost-person behavior.
It's also a crucial question for search and rescue teams, who need to accurately predict what poor lost souls will do next. For that reason, Cornell's research will form part of a comprehensive National Film Board documentary on search and rescue operations.
"[The documentary's] hook is the connection between basic research and what the search managers do finding lost persons," says Cornell. "They look at what the effects of the whole process are on the lost person and the family. So they go from the emotional grass roots, to the professionals out there ground-pounding, to the kinds of tools that we at the university provide for them to use."
The documentary will be a cross-country exposition of Canada's search and rescue efforts, says Cornell. "Canada has really been progressive-maybe because of our weather conditions-and [the NFB] wants to chronicle that."
A film crew landed briefly on campus last week to interview Cornell along with Dr. Donald Heth (who constructs computer models of geographic locations), and Dr. Dan Montello of the University of California at Santa Barbara (an expert on orientation in caves), before they all headed off to a search and rescue conference in Banff.
Award-winning NFB director Teresa MacInnes was also eager to catch footage of a woman Cornell works with who has lost the vestibular function of her inner ear which registers rotation. Such cases can provide important insight into what most of us do when disoriented, says Cornell. And it happens to all of us at some point.
"The experience of being lost is a universal human experience, that is, everybody has been lost," he says. "But it's sort of like a taboo subject-it's very difficult to get people to agree on a definition."
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