Biomedical subjects

N Chmiel

Publications and source records attributed to N Chmiel.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1997

Work characteristics and employee well-being within a context of strategic downsizing.

Findings from this 4-year longitudinal study of strategic downsizing suggest that introducing deliberate work organization and change management strategies can combat the negative effects of reduced head count. Results showed that there was no overall decrease in well-being from before to after downsizing for the 139 employees remaining in an organization, despite an increase in work demands. The potential detrimental effect of demands appears to have been offset by improvement in work characteristics arising from initiatives introduced as part of the downsizing strategy. This interpretation is consistent with analyses at the individual level, which showed that high demands were associated with poorer well-being but that increases in control, clarity, and participation were associated with improved well-being.

Adaptation, Psychological↗

PubMed1989

Response effects in the perception of conjunctions of colour and form.

Two experiments addressed the question whether visual search for a target defined by a conjunction of colour and form requires a central, serial, attentional process, but detection of a single feature, such as colour, is preattentive, as proposed by the feature-integration theory of attention. Experiment 1 investigated conjunction and feature search using small array sizes of up to five elements, under conditions which precluded eye-movements, in contrast to previous studies. The results were consistent with the theory. Conjunction search showed the effect of adding distractors to the display, the slopes of the curves relating RT to array size were in the approximate ratio of 2:1, consistent with a central, serial search process, exhaustive for absence responses and self-terminating for presence responses. Feature search showed no significant effect of distractors for presence responses. Experiment 2 manipulated the response requirements in conjunction search, using vocal response in a GO-NO GO procedure, in contrast to Experiment 1, which used key-press responses in a YES-NO procedure. Strikingly, presence-response RT was not affected significantly by the number of distractors in the array. The slope relating RT to array size was 3.92. The absence RT slope was 30.56, producing a slope ratio of approximately 8:1. There was no interaction of errors with array size and the presence and absence conditions, implying that RT-error trade-offs did not produce this slope ratio. This result suggests that feature-integration theory is at least incomplete.

Adolescent↗

PubMed1984

Phonological recoding for reading: the effect of concurrent articulation in a Stroop task.

The present experiment obtained Stroop and reverse Stroop effects in a card-sorting task where subjects were required to sort cards into bins, labelled with either colour patches or colour names in black ink, under silent and concurrent articulation conditions. Performance by normal subjects and a conduction aphasic supported the notion that concurrent articulation affects post-lexical phonology. It was shown that the status of the hypothesis that pre-lexical phonology is normally used to access meaning during reading (the speech recoding hypothesis) remained uncertain if concurrent articulation only affected post-lexical phonology.

Adolescent↗