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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. 

Recent research suggests construction workers fall prey to the cognitive biases of risk compensation, wherein workers offset safety improvements by taking more risks. Parallel previous literature indicates that time pressure and mental load may increase workers’ arousal and stress. However, it is unclear whether time, productivity, and/or cognitive demands can worsen risk compensation behaviors by stimulating workers to make riskier decisions to complete tasks faster. Combining a multi-modal mixed-reality environment with wearable neuro-psychophysiological sensors, this study examines changes in safety and task performance for high-risk electrical-line tasks simulated under time/performance pressure and cognitive demand. The results show risk-compensation is in play as subjects over-rely on safety technologies and maintain their risk perception even while undertaking more risks to adapt to increased time pressure and/or cognitive demand. This paper contributes to body of knowledge by affecting safety-training approaches and the controls needed when providing workers with safety protection and new technological advances. 

Safety training has long been considered a promising method to enhance workers’ hazard identification skills within construction sites. To improve the effectiveness of safety training, such varied features as a training environment, individuals’ learning ability, and lesson personalization have been investigated. However, as records show workers still miss hazards even after receiving safety training, understanding the fundamental cognitive reasons for unrecognized hazards becomes a crucial step toward developing effective personalized safety training. This study used various 360° panoramas of construction scenarios to empirically examine 30 workers’ visual search strategies and assess workers’ hazard identification skills. Results suggest several cognitive limitations caused failures in hazard recognition, including attentional failure, inattentional blindness, and low perceived risk. Based on these findings, this study proposes a personalized safety training framework to address such cognitive limitations to improve occupational safety in the construction industry 

Risk propensity, or individuals’ attitude toward risk, can highly impact individuals’ decision-making in high-risk environments since those who merely focus on positive consequences associated with high-risk acts are more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviors. Previous studies identified activation in the prefrontal cortex during decision-making under risk to be a sign of an individual’s attitude toward risks. To investigate whether such past work—prevalent in behavioral research domains—translates into construction safety, this study conducted an experiment in a mixed-reality environment using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technology to examine whether positive risk attitudes cause individuals to adopt risky construction behaviors and whether the activation of the prefrontal cortex of the brain can represent such risk attitudes. The results show that participants with a higher risk propensity had a higher brain activation during the risky electrical tasks; these individuals merely focused on gains, which motivated them to increase their risk-taking behavior and consequently experience more electrical accidents. Understanding workers’ attitudes toward risk will thus influence future understandings of decision behavior under risk.