How Internal Cognitive Style and External Visual Clutter Shape Inattentional Blindness and Safety Risk Perception on Construction Sites

Abstract Construction supervisors’ failure to recognize hazards contributes to accidents, and these failures occur at two distinct stages. A supervisor may not notice a hazard, or may notice it but not judge it a safety risk. This study examines how an internal factor, cognitive style, and an external factor, visual clutter (VC), shape these two stages. Fifty-three construction supervisors completed an eye-tracking experiment, viewing 29 site images with objectively quantified VC levels, and were grouped by the Sensing–Intuition (S–N) and Thinking–Feeling (T–F) dimensions of cognitive style. The overall failure of safety risk perception (FSRP) captured all recognition failures, and inattentional blindness (IB) captured the share arising from not noticing a hazard. Cognitive style significantly affected FSRP, with Intuiting–Feeling supervisors recognizing hazards more effectively than Intuiting–Thinking supervisors. Visual clutter did not change the overall level of failure but shaped its composition. As VC rose, the IB share more than doubled across all cognitive styles. A comparison with the gaze record indicated that this rise reflected hazards being looked at but not registered, rather than a failure to look. Cognitive style modulated the IB share only under low VC, a suggestive effect that warrants replication. The study contributes a two-factor framing in which cognitive style is associated with the level of failure and VC with its composition. This framing motivates a complementary management approach addressing both the supervisor and the work environment.