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Every year more than 100 fatal accidents occur in road work zones. One of the major causes of pedestrian workers being struck by construction vehicles is that workers become habituated to the warning alarms of these vehicles. Researchers suggest that workers with certain personality traits (e.g., boredom proneness and extraversion) are more likely to become habituated to workplace hazards and therefore have a higher likelihood than other workers of being involved in an accident. This study investigated which aspects of personality correlate with workers' accident proneness and their vulnerability to habituation to warning alarms in road work zones. An experiment with actual road construction workers was performed using a virtual reality (VR) environment. The results reveal that boredom susceptibility (one of the subdimensions of the personality trait of sensation seeking) is negatively correlated with workers' attention to warning alarms, and that boredom-prone workers were more likely to be involved in a virtual struck-by accident. The findings of this study provide conceptual motivation for tailoring safety training to individual workers' personality traits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Repeated exposure to hazards in road construction work zones often generates worker habituation to risks associated with those hazards, a key causal factor in workplace accidents. Understanding the developmental process of risk habituation and providing effective intervention are thus critical to preventing fatalities in road construction 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 behaviors with habituation to workplace hazards. A VR environment that simulates road construction/maintenance tasks was created and used to repeatedly expose participants to struck-by hazards in road construction operations. An accident was simulated upon the emergence of inattentiveness to hazards within the VR environment. The sustained intervention effect was examined using pretest-posttest analyses to compare the frequency and threshold of participants' vigilant behaviors. The results revealed that the VR environment elicited a reduction in attentiveness associated with risk habituation over a relatively short period of time, and the simulated accidents in the VR environment generated sustained impacts in the mitigating of the effects of habituation on attention over a week's time interval. 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]