A worker’s attentional and cognitive failures—such as lack of attention, failure to identify a tripping hazard, or misperception about a hazard’s risks—can lead to unsafe behaviors and, consequently, accidents. Previous literature has shown that individual characteristics such as personality may affect human’s selective attention. However, few studies have attempted to empirically examine how a worker’s personality affects attention and situation awareness on a jobsite. The present study examines how workers’ emotional stability (neuroticism) affects their cognitive failures (especially attentional failure) when they are exposed to fall-to-same-level hazardous conditions. To achieve this goal—and given that eye movements represent the most direct manifestation of visual attention—the personalities of construction workers were assessed via self-completion questionnaires, and their attention and situation awareness were monitored continuously and in real-time using a mobile wearable eye-tracking apparatus. Correlational analyses revealed the significant relationship between neuroticism and the attentional distribution of workers. These results suggest that workers do not allocate their attention equally to all hazardous areas and these differences in attentional distribution are modulated by personality characteristics (neuroticism). A more detailed investigation of this connection yielded a specific pattern: less neurotic workers periodically look down and scan ahead to obtain feedforward information about tripping hazards, and these individuals remain fully aware of the environment and its associated hazards. The findings of this study suggest the value assessing personality to identify workers who are more likely to be involved in accidents.
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The Role of Work Experience on Hazard Identification: Assessing the Mediating Effect of Inattention Under Fall-Hazard Conditions
One of the main contributors to the human errors that lead to catastrophic injuries in the construction workplace is the failure to identify hazards as a result of poor attention or cognitive lapses. To address this safety concern, the present study used eye-tracking technology to assess how the association between work experience and hazard identification may be mediated due to inattention. A mediation analysis was conducted and tested using a bias-corrected bootstrapping technique with 5000 resamples. The results estimate the direct and indirect effects of work experience on the hazard identification skills of construction workers observing varying hazardous conditions. The results of the mediation analysis confirm that inattention—demonstrated via inattentiveness toward hazards—mediates the relationship between work experience and hazard identification. Specifically, though work experience and dwell time positively correlate with hazard identification, the direct effect of work experience on hazard identification is attenuated with the inclusion of the mediator variables in the model, thus suggesting attentional impairment offsets the benefits of work experience. The outcomes of this study will enable researchers and safety practitioners to harness real-time eye-movement patterns to identify the precursors of cognitive failure, deficient attentional allocation, and poor visual search strategies, all of which may put workers at risk on construction sites. The results also facilitate the provision of personalized safety feedback to workers and the design of training interventions that will address unique performance deficiencies in workers to prevent the human errors that cause injuries in dynamic environments.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1824238
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10144180
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Construction Research Congress 2020
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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