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The effect of spatial compatibility on dual-task performance for various display–control configurations was studied using a tracking task and a discrete four-choice response task. A total of 36 participants took part in this study, and they were asked to perform the primary tracking task while at the same time to respond to an occasional signal. Different levels of compatibility between the stimuli and responses of the discrete response task were found to lead to different degrees of influence on the tracking task. However, degradation of performance was observed for both tasks, which was probably due to resource competition for the visual and spatial resources required for simultaneous task operation and required for bimanual responses. No right–left prevalence effect for the spatial compatibility task was observed in this study, implying that the use of unimanual two-finger responses may not provide the right conditions for a significant effect in the horizontal right–left dimension. Practitioner Summary: The effect of spatial compatibility in multiple display–control configurations was examined in a dual-task paradigm. The analyses of keen competition for visual and spatial resources in processing the dual tasks under different degrees of stimulus–response compatibility provide useful ergonomics design implications and recommendations for visual interfaces requiring frequent visual scanning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time to capture a target at the edge of a screen is expected to be less than when the target is slightly away from the screen edge. This is due to the effective target width, in the direction of cursor movement, being large when the target is at the screen edge, allowing a user to control the movement only in a direction perpendicular to the direction of movement. An experiment with 71 participants and a range of Fitts’ Index of Difficulty (ID) showed a strong difference in the capture times of targets at the screen edge and targets placed one pixel from the screen edge. This advantage is typically 100 ms, independent of the ID of the movement. Practitioner Summary:Movement time to icons placed at the screen edge (no space between icon and screen edge) is faster than when they are placed a short distance from the edge (as in Microsoft Windows). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• How construction managers decide safety measures for older workers was studied. • Factors examined covered dimensions of workers, managers, and safety measures. • The perceptions and demographics of managers play critical roles in this decision. • Workers of senior skill or accident records are likely to obtain safety measures. Construction managers play critical roles in facilitating the retention and safety of an ageing workforce. This study aims to examine the factors underlying the high behavioural intention of construction managers to implement safety measures for their older workers. A vignette study was conducted amongst 161 construction managers in Hong Kong. The factors examined covered the dimensions of the characteristics of older construction workers, types of safety measures, and the perceptions and demographics of construction managers. The results revealed that participants most frequently (46%) treat those aged 60 years and over as older construction workers. The perceptions in awareness of workforce ageing (p < 0.01), age norms (p < 0.01), and attitude towards older workers (p < 0.01) of the participants play critical roles in influencing their likelihood of possessing high behavioural intention to implement safety measures. Participants who work in small (OR = 1.659, p < 0.05) or very large companies (OR = 1.965, p < 0.01) or have limited work experience (the OR of work experience is 0.981, p < 0.05) tend to have high behavioural intention of implementing safety measures. In addition, the participants are less likely to implement safety measures for semi-skilled workers (OR = 0.793, p < 0.05) but more likely for those who have a history of accidents (OR = 1.319, p < 0.05). The findings of this study provide a conceptual framework associated with the influential factors that predict the motivation of construction management in enhancing the occupational safety of older workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Territorial similarities and differences on influence of SC and SCB were verified. • Four organizational and two individual factors were identified. • Mediating effect of individual factors (WS, PROAC) was verified toward SC and SCB. • WS negatively impacts SC and SCB in two regions, the rest causes positive effect. In view of the great number of accidents in the construction industry of both Hong Kong and Mainland China, research on the safety issues of construction personnel plays a significant role in industrial development and occupational health. Recently, although the safety consciousness (SC) and safety citizenship behavior (SCB) have been considered promising for safety enhancement, the relevant influence factors still remain unclarified. Therefore, the present study aimed to explore the main factors that influence the SC and SCB of construction workers by conducting a cross-sectional questionnaire survey with 207 responses from Hong Kong and 208 responses from Mainland China. The specifically designed questionnaires consisted of eight subscales measuring direct and indirect effects among six factors (safety climate, proactivity, prosociality, leader-to-member exchange, peer-to-peer exchange and work stress) and two constructs (SC and SCB). The collected data were analyzed through SPSS 24 and AMOS 24 to verify the influence mechanism in individual and organizational aspects of SC and SCB and further provide implications and suggestions for academic circles and industrial practitioners in line with the territorial comparison between Hong Kong and Mainland China. This study is unique as it offers a considerably good explanation for the territorial distinction of influence factors on SC and SCB for construction personnel in Mainland China and Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Identify the long-memory property in the crash fatality rate time serie. • Propose an ARFIMA-GARCH model for the long memory property in crash risk analysis. • Reveal factors influencing crash fatality risks and the long-memory property. • The findings benefit the road safety analysis at marco level. Introduction: Time series models play an important role in monitoring and understanding the serial dynamics of road crash exposures, risks, outcomes, and safety performance indicators. The time-series methods applied in previous studies on crash time series analysis assume that the serial dependency decays rapidly or even exponentially. However, this assumption is violated in most cases because of the existence of long-memory properties in the crash time series data. Ignoring the long-memory dependency could result in biased understanding of the dynamics of road traffic crashes. Method: To fill this research gap, this study proposes an autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average model with generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARFIMA-GARCH) to capture and accommodate the long-memory decencies in the road fatality rate time series. To further investigate how the factors influencing the fatality risks play a role in the long-memory dependence, the effects of exogenous variables are examined in this study. The analysis is conducted based on the road crash fatality data in Florida, USA over 44 years. Results' Conclusions: The case analysis confirmed the existence of long-memory property in the crash fatality time series data by both the joint tests of Augmented Dickey-Fuller and the Phillips–Perron, and the integer order of differencing (≤ 0.5) in the proposed models. The model results reveal that gasoline price and alcohol consumption per capita is positively associated with road fatality risks, whereas unemployment rate and rural/urban road mileage are negatively related to the road fatality risks. Practical Applications: The significant influential factors are also found to account for the long-memory serial correlations between road traffic fatalities to some extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Demographic influences were verified on SC and SCB of construction workers. • SC and SCB were differed by genders, education levels and service lengths. • SC and SCB of female workers were lower than those of male workers. • Male and female workers with poor education backgrounds showed poor SC and SCB. • SC and SCB of workers showed down and up trends as service lengths increased. The number and scale of construction industry projects have developed rapidly worldwide. However, accidents in the industry still occur with unacceptable frequency leading to serious consequences for workers, companies and communities. Safety consciousness (SC) and safety citizenship behavior (SCB) have been identified as influential constructs that have the potential to play significant roles in improving personnel safety of construction workers. So far, the obviously important influences of demographic factors on the safety consciousness and safety citizenship behavior of construction workers have not been studied. To address this research gap, a cross-sectional questionnaire survey involving 532 Chinese construction workers was conducted to collect demographic data which were classified into subgroups according to personal characteristics to investigate the demographic differences between the two safety constructs. Significant differences between safety consciousness and safety citizenship behavior were found for different genders, education levels, and lengths of service. The safety consciousness and safety citizenship behavior of female workers were worse than for males. Male and female workers with lower education backgrounds showed poor SC and SCB levels. SC and SCB for both male and female workers were found to have an initial downtrend followed by an uptrend as length of service increased. These findings suggest that construction organizations should pay much more attention to vulnerable workers such as females, young males and poorly-educated workers. Managerial strategies are recommended to enhance the occupational safety of construction workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Older construction workers were suffering with declining health conditions. • They also suffered with elevated occupational accident risks. • Health-related factors were crucial to their occupational safety. • Proper design of work conditions can relatively buffer the elevating safety risks. Aging of the workforce in Hong Kong has led to a labor shortage and increased occupational safety risks, particularly for physically demanding occupations. Work conditions should be designed to match the health and functional capacity of older workers to partly address the problems of labor shortage and safety. A cross-sectional questionnaire survey was conducted with a sample of 340 older (aged 50 and above) construction workers of Hong Kong in this study. The prevalence of health problems and occupational accidents suffered by older construction workers were investigated. The patterns of occupational accidents characterized by job demands, job resources, physical work capacity, and health conditions of workers were analyzed. Results showed that older construction workers suffered poor physical and mental health. The rate for severe accidents for older construction workers was considerably higher than for the younger workers. Physical work capacity and physical and mental health were critical factors that affected the occupational safety of older construction workers. However, the proper design of job resources and job demands to match individual health-related factors can mitigate the increasing occupational safety risks for older construction workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Visual Field (VF) principle has been found to apply in many situations, but has not been tested under many possible conditions of operator posture with different display and control locations. In this research we used four display locations, four control locations relative to a seated operator and tested the strength of population stereotype for six different types of controls with linear displays moving either horizontally or vertically and circular displays with a neutral indicator at the 12, 3, 6 and 9 o'clock positions. Apart from several minor differences in operator responses, the VF principle held up well under all these different display/control relationships. By designing the display/control arrangement to have high stereotype strength, the direction of control movement for a given direction of indicator movement can be selected to comply with the VF principle for producing fewest errors in movement direction. • Visual Field principle is valid under all different display/control relationships. • Stereotype strength of the control/display movement relationship is constant. • Visual Field principle can be used for fewest errors in movement direction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drivers’ perception-cognition-response mechanism before the hazards developing into actual crashes is a key issue of driving safety. Previous explanations on this topic are generally based on the perception-response (PR) process or risk-homeostasis (RH) mechanism. However, a micro-description and related evidences as the bridge between the existing theoretical frameworks are limited. In order to generate a better understanding of crash development, the present study examined the visual perception, electrodermal activity and behavioral responses in a uniformed hazardous situation during simulator driving. Ninety-seven drivers were recruited to complete a pre-defined driving task containing a baseline scenario and a paired hazard scenario. The results demonstrated that the crash and no-crash drivers showed similar performances in terms of PR time. However, two driver groups showed differed hazard anticipation (indicated by aroused electrodermal activity) and demonstrated distinguishable driving behaviors (measured by gas pedal, velocity and time-to-collision) before the hazard was visually detected. These findings evidenced the anticipatory risk perception and the subsequent concurrent functions of the RH mechanism and PR process at the critical moment before the occurrence of possible crashes. Therefore, a fused RH/PR framework was proposed to describe the drivers’ control loop during crash avoidance. Accordingly, several interventions were suggested to reduce crash risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]