Using eye-tracking to compare the experienced safety supervisors and novice in identifying job site hazards under a VR environment

Hazard-identification experience is a kind of tacit knowledge which is difficult to be extracted from experienced subjects and to be described explicitly in the text. Researchers have applied eye-tracking technology in eliciting the cognitive processes of experienced workers while performing the hazard-identification task. However, the image-based tasks in previous studies are substantially different from how the hazards are perceived on the construction site. To improve the ecological validity of the hazard-identification task, this study develops panoramic VR scenarios of various job sites as the stimulus, and both experienced safety supervisors and students are invited to identify hazards in the virtual sites. Their performances and eye-movement data are compared. The results show the experienced allocate more attention to hazardous areas instead of unimportant things, and they inspect more details which are ignored by the novice. The identified differences may be incorporated into the training courses to educate the hazard-identification of the novice.