Temporal Visual Patterns of Construction Hazard Recognition Strategies

Visual cognitive strategies in construction hazard recognition (CHR) signifies prominent value for the development of CHR computer vision techniques and safety training. Nonetheless, most studies are based on either sparse fixations or cross-sectional (accumulative) statistics, which lack consideration of temporality and yielding limited visual pattern information. This research aims to investigate the temporal visual search patterns for CHR and the cognitive strategies they imply. An experimental study was designed to simulate CHR and document participants’ visual behavior. Temporal qualitative comparative analysis (TQCA) was applied to analyze the CHR visual sequences. The results were triangulated based on post-event interviews and show that: (1) In the potential electrical contact hazards, the intersection of the energy-releasing source and wire that reflected their interaction is the cognitively driven visual area that participants tend to prioritize; (2) in the PPE-related hazards, two different visual strategies, i.e., “scene-related” and “norm-guided”, can usually be generalized according to the participants’ visual cognitive logic, corresponding to the bottom-up (experience oriented) and top-down (safety knowledge oriented) cognitive models. This paper extended recognition-by-components (RBC) model and gestalt model as well as providing feasible practical guide for safety trainings and theoretical foundations of computer vision techniques for CHR.