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This thesis argues that the consensus models of self forwarded and upheld in the fields of discourse most concerned with its description, indicate a process of ventriloquism where agency slips between dual poles of body and mind and cannot be tracked to a hiding place. Just as with ventriloquism, in these models of self it is unclear who is doing the 'talking', and the skill of performance would seem to make the distinction almost redundant. The self seems a complicity of often conflicting agents when analysed as its constituent parts, and not there at all when viewed as a whole. This thesis takes as its starting point the confusion of Edgar Bergen when struggling to justify his philosophical conversations with his dummy: who is at work here, and where would agency reside in such a dialogue? That it serves us to assume the 'theory of mind' explanation for the behaviours of others, and by extension place ourselves within a scaffold of causal motives, says more for the use value of such a theory than for the presence of 'mind'. Why this 'theory of mind' rather than any other? Because that is how mind and motive are presented to us during our acquisition of a spoken language. Mediation, transformation and referral: this thesis argues that these are qualities which characterize ventriloquism, and also the human means of perception and self-perception. There are a number of unfulfilled potentialities that reach their heaven in the unified self. The 'drive' to unity culls these lost futures and condemns us to another fulfilment, that of'oneness'. Most of these resolutions regarding self are predicated on what is 'in' and what is 'out'; how does the discriminatory self establish grounds for inclusivity or exclusivity? This thesis means to provide a lexicon of other possibilities regarding the conceptualization of self.

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General cognitive ability (g) is a general mental ability to reason, solve problems, comprehend complex ideas, think abstractly, learn quickly and learn from experience. Currently used IQ tests are excellent predictors of g. Heritability estimates for g range between 0.30 and 0.75 making it one of the most heritable human behavioural traits. Many behavioural phenotypes, including g, can be described as complex traits. Inheritance of such traits is governed by a mixture of genetic and environmental factors. Genetic factors contributing to total variance in g are likely to be numerous and additive in nature. In order to identify some of the genetic loci contributing to the total variance in g two approaches were employed. First, a genome-wide association study and second, candidate gene study. Genome-wide association study involved testing 1847 microsatellite markers with an average spacing of 2cM. Markers were initially screened on "original" DNA samples. This was followed by testing all positive findings on an independent "replication" sample set. Only one marker, D4S2460, was significant when all the stages of the study were completed. Investigation of candidate genes involved testing of known Apolipoprotein E (ApoE) promoter polymorphisms and Calcium/calmodulin dependant protein kinase II alpha (CaMKII-a) polymorphisms identified in our laboratories through mutation detection techniques. None of the polymorphisms in either of the two genes showed statistically significant association with a general cognitive ability.

The present thesis examined whether the interference-by-process construct, as applied to auditory distraction during visual-verbal serial recall (the irrelevant sound effect, ISE), also holds as a useful framework for interpreting auditory-semantic distraction whereby performance on tasks requiring semantic focal processes is disrupted by the semantic properties of irrelevant sound. To address this goal, several semantic focal tasks were used in conjunction with manipulations of task-instruction and of the semantic properties of irrelevant sounds. Empirical Series 1 showed that episodic recall of lists comprising exemplars drawn from a single semantic-category was disrupted by the lexicality of the irrelevant items and their semantic similarity to the to-be-remembered exemplars, but only when the task-instructions emphasised free, not serial, recall and when the irrelevant category items were dominant exemplars of a category. Moreover this series also demonstrated that irrelevant category items are often included erroneously as responses, and that this is due to a breakdown in the source-monitoring process. These results provide evidence for the interference-by-process construct in that the semantic properties of speech disrupt semantic, and source-monitoring, processing in the focal task and may also produce interference through giving rise to inhibitory processes. Series 2 showed that the presence of semantic properties in the irrelevant sound impaired semantic categorization (or category-clustering) and category, and category-exemplar, recall in the episodic recall of lists of exemplars drawn from several semantic categories, but, like Series 1, failed to produce disruption when task-instruction demanded serial recall. This finding provides yet further evidence for a conflict between two semantic processes. Finally, Series 3 showed that the semantic, but not acoustic, properties of irrelevant sound impaired retrieval from semantic memory when the focal task required retrieval from a semantic-category (requiring semantic processing), but not phonemic-category (not necessitating semantic processing). The implications of the findings for other approaches to auditory-semantic distraction, and auditory distraction generally, are discussed.

Task interruption is a pervasive applied problem despite a dearth of experimental work and the absence of a developed theoretical framework. Using a novel experimental approach (interrupting problem solving in the Tower of Hanoi task), and theoretical guidance from ACT-R-based models of goal suspension and resumption (Altmann & Trafton, 2002 Anderson & Douglass, 2001), nine experiments were conducted to assess how goal-directed behaviour is affected by interruption. A cost of interruption was exhibited mainly by extended times to resume an interrupted goal compared to an uninterrupted goal. The first empirical series established performance impairments in the form of long resumption latencies for promptly suspended goals and decrements in move accuracy, especially when interruption fell before or during a complex goal-sequence, with performance impaired further by secondary tasks that were similar to primary tasks. The second empirical series revealed that participants opportunistically encode promptly suspended goals for retrieval, a process supported by the associative activation provided by a salient colour priming cue and impaired when such a cue had changed colour and/or location. With a brief time lag before secondary task initiation, participants were able to encode a suspended goal more efficiently, reflected in faster resumption latencies even when secondary tasks were similar and when interruption fell within a complex goal sequence. The findings suggest that suspended goals do not reside in a heightened level of activation such that retrieval is definite (e.g., Goschke & Kuhl, 1993) neither is retrieval always abandoned at longer retention intervals (as suggested by Anderson & Lebiere, 2001). Instead, goals decay as a power function of the time since they were last processed and suffer retroactive interference from other goals, but can be reactivated if appropriately rehearsed and associated with salient retrieval cues (in support of Altmann & Trafton, 2002). In contrast to Altmann and Trafton, participants exhibit retrieval-like behaviour even when interruption is un-signalled, with efficiency augmented by experience of problem solving in the task domain and experience of being interrupted. The current experiments provide a novel insight into interruption management behaviours, particularly that humans are able and willing to adapt strategies to support faster and more efficient transitions back into the primary task.

Learning allows organisms to predict and prepare for events in the environment that are not sufficiently regular that responses to each situation could be genetically hardwired. A possible categorization of what can be learned is as follows: First, an animal may learn that an event is likely to happen. This means learning predictive relations between events, or the probability that an event A occurs with an event B, rather than independently. Second, they may form a representation of the magnitude of the event. Third, animals may learn when an event is likely to happen, the temporal relations between events. Fourth, they may acquire knowledge where something will happen, the spatial relations between events. The question arises whether these distinctions are merely convenient labels or reflect genuine differences between dissociable psychological variables and perhaps processes. The most widely accepted account of animal learning, associative learning theory, assumes that information from all these variables is collapsed into only a single output variable: the strength of an associative link. The theoretical framework of associative learning has predominantly been developed and tested within the domain of learning about predictive relationships between events, weighted by event relevance. The requirements for navigation through space are in some respects quite different. Animals can influence the rate and direction of their passage through space. In the two or three dimensions of space shortcuts and detours become possible. The computation of path length may require vector addition. Possible goals of computation will be considered and compared to data on the contents, acquisition and manipulation of spatial representations. The experimental part of this thesis concentrates on two aspects of information acquisition, landmark stability and blocking. Animals appear to weigh information from different sources according to two different and normally opposed criteria, accuracy and reliability. If discrepancy between two such sources is small, more weight will be given to the more accurate source of information, if the discrepancy is large more to the reliable source. The experiments on landmark stability suggest that manipulating discrepancy throughout training will influence animals' estimate of reliability of a source of information. Other manipulations of this estimate, independent from discrepancy, are also possible. The experiments on blocking have not yielded a simple result. Blocking occurs when the animals were trained with one of two landmark arrays; the other array led to an enhancement of performance when testing with the added landmarks. In addition, previous work on the "geometric module" has been extended and a novel weighting of landmarks by position in the array, rather than distance from a goal, has been found. It is argued that there associative learning can play a role in the creation of most possible representations of space, but that some aspects of navigation involve computations which associative learning is not capable of. Further, consideration of the possible functions of navigation suggests that there is no clear dichotomy between mapping and non-mapping strategies. The features of cognitive maps derived from analogy with physical maps do not form an indivisible category. A navigational system may have only some of these properties, depending on what is required of it. The supposed incompatibility of cognitive mapping and associative learning does not exist, both because there are several navigational strategies that could be considered cognitive mapping processes and because associative learning could contribute to most of them.

Contemporary theories of skill acquisition emphasise qualitative changes in processing as expertise is acquired (Anderson 1981; Cheng 1985; Newell 1990; 1998; Lewis 2001). In particular, describing this qualitative change as a switch from calculating the answer to the retrieval of the solutions from memory, is popular (Campitelli and Gobet, 2005; Logan 1988,2002; Nosofsky & Palmeri, 1997; Palmeri, 1997, 1999) Against this background, Haider and Frensch (1996, 1999a, 1999b, 2002) have recently identified some of the quantitative changes that may also occur with practice, changes which they term Information Reduction (IR). They demonstrated that people could 'reduce' to processing task-relevant segments of a stimulus, without instruction to do so. Further they found this effect was not stimulus-specific, transferring to novel item sets. This latter point was particularly troublesome for any theory reliant on the retrieval of exemplars from memory, since such a strategy will become unsuccessful for novel items. The work presented in this thesis further explored the factors that may playa role in IR. Study 1 both replicated the basic effect and also found reduction when the visual regularity of the stimulus was varied. Study 2 realised a new target search task (TST) in which IR also developed, generalising the strategy beyond the original alphabet arithmetic task (AAT). The third study of the thesis investigated further attributes that could inhibit or facilitate reduction. The final study determined the regularity of task-redundancy necessary for IR to take place. The results are discussed in terms of the residual processing of task irrelevant items and the overall part IR must play in skill acquisition.

A series of studies was conducted to systematically assess the impact of additions to the UTAUT model in the form of trust, social and cognitive ability variables. The overall aim was to establish a model usable for all types of technologies, including devices, services or interfaces. Starting with the well-known measures of TA and current lifestyle technology, multiple studies were carried out with participants mainly from the UK. The first study focused on E-Reader technology, and included classic TA measures as well as measures of technology trust and social aspects. These were, in parts, shown to be significant predictors of technology acceptance operationalized as Intention to Use (ITU). Based on the results from this study, TabletPC technology was examined in Study 2, confirming the established model using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modelling (SEM). The focus was then shifted to cognitive aspects, which have so far been rather underrepresented in classic TA research. The new approach introduced in this research showed comparable benefits to significantly longer measures used in existing literature. The trust and social related variables did not add significantly to the model in the third study, focussing on the use of computers. The cognitive ability variables however significantly improved the model. In order to confirm initial findings regarding 'trust' related variables, a fourth study was carried out focusing on online social networks and the role that trust plays in the user interaction. This confirmed the structure of the constructs for the technology that they were initially designed for. The fifth and final study was a confirmatory study testing the established model on workplace technology. This was designed to finalize the confirmatory approach this research has been guided by: starting with workplace technology and a seemingly universal model, introducing new variables to enhance the model and allow it to predict non-workplace technology use, and finally testing it on workplace technology for its universality. The results showed that the inclusion of social variables added significantly to the amount of variance accounted for by the model. Furthermore, the structure of the resulting LTAM model showed links with previous hypotheses regarding latent links between Perceived Ease of Use and Perceived Usefulness.

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