Examining the relationship between personality characteristics and worker's attention under fall and tripping hazard conditions

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.