Tilburg University

About: Tilburg University is a education organization based out in Tilburg, Noord-Brabant, Netherlands. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Anxiety. The organization has 5550 authors who have published 22330 publications receiving 791335 citations.

Temporal factors in mental work: Effects of interrupted activities

Abstract: Although interruptions are daily occurring events for most working people, little research has been done on the impacts of interruptions on workers and their performance. This study examines the e Vects of interruptions on task performance and its regulation, as well as on workers’ psychological and psychophysiological state. Two parallel experiments were carried out in the Netherlands and in Russia, using a common conceptual framework and overlapping designs. Employees with relevant work experience carried out realistic text editing tasks in a simulated o Yce environment, while the frequency and complexity of interruptions were experimentally manipulated. It was hypothesized that interruptions: (i) would cause a deterioration of performance; (ii) evoke strategies to partially compensate for this deterioration; (iii) aVect subjects’ emotions and well-being negatively; and (iv) raise the level of eVort and activation. It was also hypothesized that greater frequency and complexity of interruptions would enhance the expected e Vects. The hypotheses are only partially cone rmed. The results show that, contrary to what was expected, interruptions cause people to perform the main task faster while maintaining the level of quality. Participants develop strategies enabling them to deal e Vectively with the interruptions, while actually over-compensating the potential performance decline. Interruptions do have a negative impact on emotion and well-being, and lead to an increase of e Vort expenditure, although not to an increase in activation. Thus the improved performance is achieved at the expense of higher psychological costs. Greater complexity evoked more favourable responses among the Dutch participants and more unfavourable ones among the Russian participants. These diVerences are interpreted in terms of the participants’ professional background. The research demonstrates that the e Vects of interruptions reach beyond the execution of additional tasks and the change of work strategies. Interruptions appear to have an after-e Vect, ine uencing the workers’ subsequent readiness to perform. Detailed analysis of the activity in the interruption interval, focusing on

Does the stock market value bank diversification

Abstract: This paper investigates whether or not functionally diversified banks have a comparative advantage in terms of long-term performance/risk profile compared to their specialized competitors. To that end, this study uses market-based measures of return potential and bank risk. We calculate the franchise value over time of European banks as a measure of their long-run performance potential. In addition, we measure risk as both the systematic and the idiosyncratic risk components derived from a bank stock return model. Finally, we analyze the return/risk trade-off implied in different functional diversification strategies using a panel data analysis over the period 1989–2004. A higher share of non-interest income in total income affects banks’ franchise values positively. Diversification of revenue streams from distinct financial activities increases the systematic risk of banks while the effect on the idiosyncratic risk component is non-linear and predominantly downward-sloping. These findings have conflicting implications for different stakeholders, such as investors, bank shareholders, bank managers and bank supervisors.

Assessing Performance of Orthology Detection Strategies Applied to Eukaryotic Genomes

Abstract: Orthology detection is critically important for accurate functional annotation, and has been widely used to facilitate studies on comparative and evolutionary genomics. Although various methods are now available, there has been no comprehensive analysis of performance, due to the lack of a genomic-scale ‘gold standard’ orthology dataset. Even in the absence of such datasets, the comparison of results from alternative methodologies contains useful information, as agreement enhances confidence and disagreement indicates possible errors. Latent Class Analysis (LCA) is a statistical technique that can exploit this information to reasonably infer sensitivities and specificities, and is applied here to evaluate the performance of various orthology detection methods on a eukaryotic dataset. Overall, we observe a trade-off between sensitivity and specificity in orthology detection, with BLAST-based methods characterized by high sensitivity, and tree-based methods by high specificity. Two algorithms exhibit the best overall balance, with both sensitivity and specificity>80%: INPARANOID identifies orthologs across two species while OrthoMCL clusters orthologs from multiple species. Among methods that permit clustering of ortholog groups spanning multiple genomes, the (automated) OrthoMCL algorithm exhibits better within-group consistency with respect to protein function and domain architecture than the (manually curated) KOG database, and the homolog clustering algorithm TribeMCL as well. By way of using LCA, we are also able to comprehensively assess similarities and statistical dependence between various strategies, and evaluate the effects of parameter settings on performance. In summary, we present a comprehensive evaluation of orthology detection on a divergent set of eukaryotic genomes, thus providing insights and guides for method selection, tuning and development for different applications. Many biological questions have been addressed by multiple tests yielding binary (yes/no) outcomes but no clear definition of truth, making LCA an attractive approach for computational biology.

Sound enhances visual perception: cross-modal effects of auditory organization on vision.

Abstract: Six experiments demonstrated cross-modal influences from the auditory modality on the visual modality at an early level of perceptual organization. Participants had to detect a visual target in a rapidly changing sequence of visual distractors. A high tone embedded in a sequence of low tones improved detection of a synchronously presented visual target (Experiment 1), but the effect disappeared when the high tone was presented before the target (Experiment 2). Rhythmically based or order-based anticipation was unlikely to account for the effect because the improvement was unaffected by whether there was jitter (Experiment 3) or a random number of distractors between successive targets (Experiment 4). The facilitatory effect was greatly reduced when the tone was less abrupt and part of a melody (Experiments 5 and 6). These results show that perceptual organization in the auditory modality can have an effect on perceptibility in the visual modality.