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1. The Role of Work Experience on Hazard Identification: Assessing the Mediating Effect of Inattention Under Fall-Hazard Conditions

   Aroke, O.; Esmaeili, B.; Hasanzadeh, S.; Dodd, M. D.; and Brock, R. (March 2020, Construction Research Congress 2020)

   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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2. Volcanic Hazard Assessment for an Eruption Hiatus, or Post-eruption Unrest Context: Modeling Continued Dome Collapse Hazards for Soufrière Hills Volcano

   https://doi.org/10.3389/feart.2020.535567  

   Spiller, Elaine T.; Wolpert, Robert L.; Ogburn, Sarah E.; Calder, Eliza S.; Berger, James O.; Patra, Abani K.; Pitman, E. Bruce (December 2020, Frontiers in Earth Science)

   null (Ed.)

   Effective volcanic hazard management in regions where populations live in close proximity to persistent volcanic activity involves understanding the dynamic nature of hazards, and associated risk. Emphasis until now has been placed on identification and forecasting of the escalation phase of activity, in order to provide adequate warning of what might be to come. However, understanding eruption hiatus and post-eruption unrest hazards, or how to quantify residual hazard after the end of an eruption, is also important and often key to timely post-eruption recovery. Unfortunately, in many cases when the level of activity lessens, the hazards, although reduced, do not necessarily cease altogether. This is due to both the imprecise nature of determination of the “end” of an eruptive phase as well as to the possibility that post-eruption hazardous processes may continue to occur. An example of the latter is continued dome collapse hazard from lava domes which have ceased to grow, or sector collapse of parts of volcanic edifices, including lava dome complexes. We present a new probabilistic model for forecasting pyroclastic density currents (PDCs) from lava dome collapse that takes into account the heavy-tailed distribution of the lengths of eruptive phases, the periods of quiescence, and the forecast window of interest. In the hazard analysis, we also consider probabilistic scenario models describing the flow’s volume and initial direction. Further, with the use of statistical emulators, we combine these models with physics-based simulations of PDCs at Soufrière Hills Volcano to produce a series of probabilistic hazard maps for flow inundation over 5, 10, and 20 year periods. The development and application of this assessment approach is the first of its kind for the quantification of periods of diminished volcanic activity. As such, it offers evidence-based guidance for dome collapse hazards that can be used to inform decision-making around provisions of access and reoccupation in areas around volcanoes that are becoming less active over time. 

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3. Spatial Exposure to Dynamic Safety Hazards in Construction Sites through 360-Degree Augmented Panoramas: Ecological Validity in Safety Research

   https://doi.org/10.1061/9780784483985.073  

   Lee, Kyeongsuk; Hasanzadeh, Sogand; Esmaeili, Behzad (March 2022, Construction Research Congress 2022)

   Given the dynamic and complex nature of the construction industry, maintaining situation awareness at job sites is critical. To react properly, workers must identify dynamic safety hazards within the scene. The majority of studies assessing construction workers’ situation awareness have utilized static images, virtual reality, and other types of simulation methods, but questions remain as to whether these formats are able to capture and monitor workers’ naturalistic behaviors and hazard identification abilities. To identify whether the format of hazardous stimuli (i.e., static, image-based vs. dynamic, and video-based formats) impact workers’ subjective and objective hazard identification and situation awareness metrics, this study developed 23 safety hazard scenarios utilizing state-of-the-art augmented 360° panoramas and then tracked differences in workers’ visual search patterns and hazard identification abilities using eye-tracking technology. The workers’ cognitive responses, evidenced by their eye movements, showed that workers had significantly varied cognitive processes and abilities depending on the format of stimuli: Workers with lower hazard identification skills were more likely to miss hazards in a dynamic environment. This result suggests that the experimental setting should be carefully designed to determine construction workers’ natural cognitive process. 

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4. Working-Memory Load as a Factor Determining the Safety Performance of Construction Workers

   Liko, G.; Esmaeili, B.; Hasanzadeh, S.; Dodd, M. D.; and Brock, R. (March 2020, Construction Research Congress 2020)

   Cognitive processes have been found to contribute substantially to the human errors that lead to construction accidents. Working memory—a cognitive system with a limited capacity that is responsible for temporarily holding information available for processing—plays an important role in reasoning and decision-making. Since eye movements indicate where a worker directs his/her attention, tracking such movements provides a practical way to measure workers’ attention and comprehension of construction hazards. As a departure in construction industry research, this study correlates attentional allocation with working memory to assess workers’ situation awareness under different scenarios that expose workers to various hazards. To achieve this goal, this study merges research linking eye movements and workers’ attention with research focused on working-memory load and decision making and evaluates what, how, and where a worker distributes his/her attention while performing a task under different working-memory loads. Path analysis models then examined the direct and indirect effect of different working-memory loads on hazard identification performance. The independent variable (working-memory load) is linked to the dependent variable (hazard identification) through the set of mediators (attention metrics). The results showed that the high-memory load condition delayed workers’ hazard identification. The findings of this study emphasize the important role working memory plays in determining how and why workers in dynamic work environments fail to detect, comprehend, and/or respond to physical risks. 

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5. Impact of Immersive Training on Senior Chemical Engineering Students' Prioritization of Process Safety Decision Criteria

   Stransky, J. (July 2021, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   Process safety is becoming a greater focus of chemical plant design and operation due to the number of incidents involving dangerous chemical accidents. Since its creation nearly 20 years ago, the Chemical Safety Board (CSB) has investigated 130 safety incidents and provided over 800 safety recommendations to operating chemical facilities. Following a gas well blowout in 2018, the CSB gave a recommendation to the American Petroleum Institute (API) to establish recommended practice on alarm management. Similarly, in 2017, the CSB gave a recommendation to Arkema Inc. to update their emergency response training following a hurricane that caused a fire at one of their manufacturing sites. Many times, CSB-led investigations resulted in new regulations and standards that are enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) or the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). These critical recommendations positively impact not only the plant workers but also the surrounding community and the environment. While these safety measures enhance industrial safety culture, it is important that process safety also be integrated into university-level engineering curricula to promote safety culture while future engineers are still developing. Integrating process safety into the curriculum prepares students by familiarizing them with the difficult decisions they will be required to make in professional practice. ABET, the engineering program accreditation body, acknowledges the value of early, appropriate training within their program guidelines “Criteria for Chemical Engineering Curriculum” which states that recognition and assessment of the hazards associated with chemical processes must be included in the curriculum for program accreditation. Based on this requirement, many institutions have taken the approach to integrate process safety into their curriculum using video case studies, adding entire courses to cover hazard identification, and including safety lectures in design courses. A common theme missing from these methods is instruction on how to approach, recognize, and navigate decisions within a process safety context; a lack of this situational awareness was noted as a key element in industrial process safety incidents. Understanding how students approach process safety decisions is important for developing teaching methods and curriculum that will better prepare them for professional practice. As part of this study, we will measure how students rank criteria associated with process safety decisions, and how these prioritizations change after exposure to a process safety decision making intervention. Through this work, we hope to determine how process safety curriculum may be improved to help better prepare students for process safety decisions within industry. 

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