Enhancing Hazard Identification: A Comprehensive Approach to Personalized Safety Training Addressing Cognitive Limitations

Safety training plays a pivotal role in elevating workers' hazard identification skills. Recent research emphasizes the need for tailored training, acknowledging individuals' diverse cognitive limitations, including attentional failures and misperceptions of risks. Despite recognizing the importance of personalized safety training, existing research predominantly only categorizes cognitive failures without developing customized interventions to address these issues. To bridge this gap, this study (1) conducted a comprehensive literature review to delineate the characteristics of each type of cognitive limitation and potential training strategies and (2) developed a personalized safety training program and validated the effectiveness of the proposed methods. Our findings reveal that, on average, the customized training enhanced hazard identification performance among participants by 23%. This study contributes to the existing body of knowledge by offering actionable insights into the development and validation of personalized safety training strategies by focusing on mitigating cognitive failures.