Enhancing Cognitive Control for Improvement of Inspection Performance: A Study of Construction Safety

Since safety inspection safeguards robustness of the construction projects, the cognitive issues of safety inspectors requires more understanding, catering improvement of management processes and policies. Researchers on safety management suggested that even though with the help of comprehensive checklist, inspectors were still prone to missing observation of critical risks during inspection. However, few of them clarified the nature of missing observations, as well as providing effective solutions with empirical support. This study aims at summarizing the pattern of missing observations during inspection from the perspective of cognitive psychology. A causal model of missing observation was established, a practical measure was proposed and verified through an experiment using eye-tracking device. The results revealed that, excessive inspection contents and ambiguity in description of checklist will increase the cognitive-control load of inspectors and results in observation miss. And a procedure-oriented checklist might be an effective solution to such defects.