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The Soviet psychologist and neurologist Alexander Luria (1902-1977) asserted that human consciousness is formed by and participates in forming history. His explicitly Marxist approach to psychology and neurology itself emerged from a particular time and place. This thesis seeks to restore Luria’s work to its history, situating his research in its Soviet context - from the October Revolution in 1917 through the collectivisation of agriculture and Stalinist Terror to the Second World War. This PhD follows the course of Luria’s career through Soviet history, and is also structured around the developmental trajectories that informed his research. Luria’s work was consistently concerned with tracing the emergence of the ‘culturally developed’ human being, defined as an educated person capable of exerting an influence on their environment. He argued that this figure was the result of various developmental trajectories: the biological evolution of the species from animal to human, the cultural development of societies from ‘primitivism’ to ‘civilization’, and the maturation of the individual from baby to adult. Chapter 1 discusses Luria’s early engagement with psychoanalysis and his rejection of the Freudian death drive. Chapter 2 considers experiments Luria conducted in Soviet Central Asia during the period of the First Five Year Plan (1928-1932), exploring his engagement with Stalinism through an analysis of his attempt to trace a transition from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilized’ thought. Chapter 3 focuses on the contradictory figure of the revolutionary child, who occupied a symbolic position in Soviet culture between change and continuity. Finally, Chapter 4 turns to consider Luria’s work with people who survived brain injuries inflicted during the Second World War. It concludes by arguing that the war violently interrupted the progressive developmental trajectories Luria’s work had hitherto been structured around (which broadly agreed with orthodox Marxist-Leninist accounts of historical progress). It is at that moment, I contend, that he finally developed the ‘real, not sham’ Marxist psychology he had always sought to create.

This thesis explores developmental trends in metacognitive knowledge with school-aged children using Pupil Views Templates (PVTs). PVTs were developed in the mid 2000s to explore pupil views of learning. Informed by the findings of previous research, the empirical data collection used a more systematic and stratified sampling technique. A systematic review of tools and methods to measure or assess metacognition was included as a way of codifying PVTs. The systematic review makes an original contribution to both this study and the field; in a field as vast as metacognition it provides a valuable summary. The exploration of metacognitive knowledge is based on, but does not completely replicate, the pre-existing approach to coding PVTs. A rigorous examination of relevant literature rationalised and grounded the focus on metacognitive knowledge. This underscored ambiguity around defining metacognition, sub-divisions of it and crossover between these. Thus, the clarity of defining metacognition for and within this study was key. The mixed method approach to PVT analysis was distinctive in its application of traditional statistical analysis and emergent interpretivist methods including word clouds. Analysis confirmed the utility of PVTs as a means to explore metacognition in school-aged children. It supported the assertion that PVTs are a tool that can be used with a wide range of ages to explore metacognitive knowledge, including children as young as four years old. There was evidence of developmental trends in metacognitive knowledge and indications to support inextricable links between underlying cognitive skills and metacognition. This study also showed the importance of considering how metacognition is explored; including the definition of metacognition applied, how it is operationalised and then analysed. If a study does not have clear links between the concept, its measurement and outcomes; it becomes difficult to determine validity and subsequent value both within and for the field.

Depression and anxiety commonly co-occur and have been associated with cognitive biases and executive function deficits across development. Twin studies indicate considerable genetic overlap between internalizing symptoms and cognitive processes. However, relatively little is known about how genetic, environmental and cognitive processes contribute to the co-occurrence of depression and anxiety symptoms over time. Twin modelling analyses were conducted using three longitudinal population-based twin samples – ECHO, G1219 and TEDS. The first half of this thesis focused on developmental associations between depression and four different anxiety symptom clusters. First, the phenotypic and genetic structure of symptoms was examined cross-sectionally in childhood, adolescence and young adulthood. Developmental differences in the aetiology of the relationship between depression and anxiety were found, with genetic influences becoming less disorder-specific from adolescence. Next, longitudinal analyses found that both stable and newly emerging genes, and to a lesser extent non-shared environmental effects, contributed to the co-occurrence of depression and anxiety across adolescence and young adulthood. The second half of this thesis focused on cognitive processes involved in the aetiology and maintenance of depression and anxiety. First, associations between anxiety sensitivity dimensions and depression and anxiety symptoms were investigated. Results identified disorder-specific versus shared cognitive content in depression and anxiety that was generally unchanged across development and was underpinned by broad genetic vulnerability. Second, association between mindfulness, anxiety sensitivity and depression was investigated. Mindfulness was found to be moderately heritable and the relationship between attentional control aspect of mindfulness, depression and anxiety sensitivity was largely due to shared genetic liability. Finally, using an experimental study conducted in sixty-one 8-10 years old children, depression and anxiety were found to be independently associated with poorer attentional control. This attentional deficit may account for some of the attentional biases often observed in anxious and depressed children on tasks investigating processing of emotional stimuli.

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While the search for scientific measures, models and explanations of consciousness is currently a growing area of research, this thesis identifies a series of methodological problems with the field that suggest that ‘consciousness’ is not in fact a viable scientific concept. This eliminativist stance is supported by assessing the current theories and methods of consciousness science on their own grounds, and by applying frameworks and criteria for ‘good’ scientific practice from philosophy of science. A central problem consists in the way that qualitative difference and dissociation paradigms are misused in order to identify measures of consciousness. Another problem concerns the wide range of experimental protocols used to operationalise consciousness and the implications this has on the findings of integrative approaches across behavioural and neurophysiological research. Following from this the way that mechanisms of consciousness have been inadequately demarcated, and how this affects whether ‘consciousness’ refers to any scientific kinds, is discussed. A final problem is the significant mismatch that exists between the common intuitions and phenomenological claims about the content of consciousness that motivate much current consciousness science, and the properties of neural processes that underlie sensory and cognitive phenomena. It is argued that the failure of these methods to be appropriately applied to the concept of consciousness, both in particular cases, and in the way that these methods fail to fulfil their crucial heuristic role in the practise of science, suggests that the concept of ‘consciousness’ should be eliminated from scientific discourse. Aside from the purely negative claim found in eliminativist accounts, the strong empirical grounding of this eliminativist claim also allows positive characterisations to be made about the products of the current science of consciousness, to (re-)identify real target phenomena and valid research questions for the mind sciences, and to suggest how the intuitions that ground the confused research program on consciousness result from real features of our cognitive architecture.

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