Evaluating Safety Compliance History as an Indicator of Attentional Allocation and Unsafe Response Inhibition among Construction Workers

Effective hazard recognition in construction environments requires workers to allocate attention to hazard-related cues and inhibit unsafe or impulsive responses. Although safety compliance is widely adopted as an indicator of construction workers’ safety performance, it remains unclear whether differences in compliance rates reflect variations in hazard-related cognitive processing. This study aimed to examine whether construction workers’ implicit cognitive processing of hazards differ according to their safety compliance history. Fifty-two construction workers were classified into high-compliance and low-compliance groups based on documented safety behaviors and completed two implicit cognitive tasks: a change detection task assessing attentional allocation and a go/no-go task evaluating response inhibition, the ability to suppress response initiation when confronted with hazard stimuli. In the change detection task, both groups exhibited faster responses to safety-relevant changes, indicating a shared attentional bias toward hazards. However, only the high-compliance group demonstrated balanced detection accuracy between hazardous and nonhazardous stimuli, whereas the low-compliance group showed relatively higher accuracy for nonhazardous changes. In contrast, no significant group differences were observed in perceptual sensitivity, commission error rate, or decision criterion in the go/no-go task. These results suggest that while compliance history may be associated with certain attentional patterns toward hazards, it does not necessarily reflect decision-related cognitive control. These findings highlight the importance of integrating cognitive assessments into safety evaluations to identify critical differences in workers’ readiness to detect and respond to hazards beyond observable compliance behaviors.