Construction Research Congress 2020
Working-Memory Load as a Factor Determining the Safety Performance of Construction Workers
Publication: Construction Research Congress 2020: Safety, Workforce, and Education
ABSTRACT
Cognitive processes have been found to contribute substantially to the human errors that lead to construction accidents. Working memory is a cognitive system with a limited capacity that deals with storage and active processing and is critical to a number of different processes. As a departure in construction industry research, this study correlates attentional allocation (measured via eye tracking) 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 to evaluate 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 a 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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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The National Science Foundation is thanked for supporting the research reported in this paper through the Decision, Risk and Management Sciences (DRMS) program (Grant Nos. 1824238 and 1824224). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Construction Research Congress 2020: Safety, Workforce, and Education
Pages: 499 - 508
Editors: Mounir El Asmar, Ph.D., Arizona State University, David Grau, Ph.D., Arizona State University, and Pingbo Tang, Ph.D., Arizona State University
ISBN (Online): 978-0-7844-8287-2
Copyright
© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Published online: Nov 9, 2020
Published in print: Nov 9, 2020
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