The impact of engineering information complexity on working memory development of construction workers: An eye-tracking investigation

Owing to the increasing complexity of construction tasks and operations performed in confined workplaces, workers rely progressively on working memory, i.e., the short-term and temporary storage of information pertaining to near future events, to ensure the seamless execution of construction tasks. Although literature has discovered a strong relationship between engineering information formats and the quality of working memory, there is still a clear theoretical disagreement on the implications of the complexity of engineering information in the development of working memory. This study addresses the knowledge gap with a human-subject experiment (n=60). Participants were required to review one of the two instructions for a pipe maintenance task: a simple 2D isometric drawing with bulletins (2D-simple) and a complex 2D isometric drawing with rich text (2D-complex). After the review session, the participants were asked to perform the pipe maintenance task in a virtual reality (VR) environment. Collected data include participants' task performance (accuracy and time), pupillary dilations, and gaze movements. The results show that the 2D-simple group outperformed the 2D-complex group in terms of both accuracy and time. An attention pattern analysis using approximate entropy (ApEn) of gaze movements suggests that a higher ApEn in the vertical axis, i.e., a more irregular and complex gaze movement between instructions, may result in a more efficient use of working memory and thus contributes to a better performance. This study provides preliminary evidence regarding the impact of engineering information complexity on the working memory development of construction workers.