Gender, alcohol, pacing and incentive effects on an electronics assembly task

Abstract

Eight female and eight male subjects received blood alcohol concentration doses of placebo, 0·05,0·07, and 0·09% before participating in paced and unpaced treatment conditions for an electronic grid board manual assembly task. The paced task included three levels of pacing: fast, moderate and slow. The fast pace parts supply required the worker to operate at maximum speed to keep up; the moderate pace at 75% of maximum; and slow, 50%. Parts were supplied by a conveyor belt. The unpaced task had incentive instructions to encourage the operator to maximize speed of performance or accuracy of performance. The number of correctly Completed Units and the number of performance errors were counted. The task required subjects tosclect appropriate resistors, place them on the boards at specific locations, and adjust an analogue meter to a specific value. There were significant gender and alcohol main effects for both paced and unpaced conditions. The performance of females was more affected than males by BAC levels. Females worked faster than males and made more errors. The relative number of errors increased at slower paces. Females were more affected by pacing than males. Both sexes produced more correctly Completed Units per unit time of actual work when the pace slowed. The speed incentive instruction resulted in more correctly completed units than the accuracy, but instructions had no significant effect on errors. Females' performance was more affected by instructions than males'. The speed condition was more affected by increasing BAC than was accuracy. Since females worked much faster than males, this factor could account for their greater sensitivity to BAC levels.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

M. A. E. RADWAN

Visiting professor from the University of Cairo, Cairo, Egypt