Abstract
Repeated exposure to hazards in road construction work zones often generates worker habituation to risks associated with those hazards, a key factor in workplace accidents. Understanding the developmental process of risk habituation and providing effective intervention are critical to preventing fatalities in work zones. To this end, this study investigates the efficacy of virtual reality (VR) as a behavioral intervention tool to mitigate a decline in vigilant orienting behaviors with habituation to workplace hazards. A VR environment that simulates road construction/maintenance tasks was created and used to repeatedly expose construction workers to struck-by hazards. An accident was simulated upon the emergence of inattentiveness to hazards within the VR environment as measured from eye tracking. The sustained intervention effect was examined using pretest-posttest analyses to compare the frequency and threshold of participants’ vigilant orienting behaviors. The results revealed that the VR environment elicited a reduction in the attentiveness associated with risk habituation over a relatively short period of time. Furthermore, the simulated accidents in the VR environment generated sustained impacts in mitigating the effects of habituation on visual attention over a week’s time interval. These results were consistent with electroencephalographic (EEG) data recorded before and after the VR training. In the two EEG sessions, we measured neural activity to alarm sounds similar to those used in construction operations. EEG data revealed that, compared to control sounds, the attentional and sensory-perceptual processing of alarm sounds increased significantly after the VR training, which may have facilitated visual attention to stimuli that generate such sounds in the second VR session. The outcomes of this study contribute to the understanding of how workers’ risk habituation can be measured in a VR environment and provide new knowledge regarding how a VR-based behavioral intervention can mitigate the attentional consequences of habituation to repeatedly exposed workplace hazards.