Data from twelve auditory signal detection experiments show that a model general to all signal detection tasks explains results better than specific auditory models. This thesis examines models of the detection of sinusoids in Gaussian white noise, all predicting linear ROC-curves on normal-normal co-ordinates, but differing in their predictions for the ROC-curve slope. Distinction is made between stimulus distributions, transducer distributions and response-inferred distributions. Response-inferred distributions include variance from stimuli, transducers and unstable criteria. The first three experiments (rating) showed that slope increases with increases in p(sn) and in the number of categories available for describing the presence of the signal. An explanation for this data assumes that the 'yes-no' criterion has the least variance and other criteria have variances proportional to their distances from the 'yes-no' criterion. This explanation is developed into a model of selective attention in which the variance of all real criteria is a function of their distances from an optimal criterion. Faulty memory is the assumed cause of criterion variance. Predictions that follow from the model are (i) there is a decline in criterion variance as signal strength increases ; (ii) there is a U- (or inverted U-) shaped function relating slope and signal strength; (iii) criterion variance is less in forced-choice tasks than in 'yes-no' tasks; and (iv) slope is partially determined by task design and any other factor which affects the subject's memory for signal or noise. Experiments 4-6 establish that the concept of criterion variance also applies to yes-no procedures, and Experiments 7-11 substantiate predictions made by the model of selective attention. Data from Experiments 5, 7, 8, 9 and 10 are analysed in terms of models of sinusoidal burst and gap detection. None of the probabilistic models is adequate, but Zwislocki's (1969) deterministic model of temporal summation accounts for the data. A model of response-inferred distributions is presented in which the mathematical relationships of the variances and locations of criteria, of signal strength and of stimulus variances to the slope of the ROC-curve are described. Equations for the optimal criterion, the variance of individual criteria and a measure of sensitivity uncontaminated by criterion variance are derived. Re-analysis of data using the model of response-inferred distributions supports the predictions of the model of selective attention. The model of response-inferred distributions predicts 'peaked' rating ROC-curves which are similar to two-state functions and commonly observed in the literature. However, both two-state and high-threshold theories are unable to explain the data. Experiment 12 compares the model of response-inferred distributions with Pike's (1973) multiple observations model for latency data and finds the latter model inferior. Criterion variance is shown to account fox at least half of the variance of the response-inferred distributions, and consequently, it is argued that TSD results should be viewed more in terms of the general processes which produce criterion variance than modality-specific models of signal processing.

Eight marsupial phalangers, (Trichosurus vulpecula) with mid-saggital section of the optic chiasma were trained monocularly in a visual discrimination task, as were four which had, in addition, mid-saggital sections of the anterior commissure, fasciculus aberrans and hippocampal commissure. All were tested for transfer to the untrained hemisphere. The results showed that those with the commissures intact transferred information to the hemisphere not trained directly, while those with commissures sectioned did not. It appears that transfer of visual information between cerebral hemispheres can take place in an animal which lacks a corpus callosum, and that the forebrain commissures may be the functional equivalent, in this marsupial, of the corpus callosum in eutherians. A further eight animals received mid-saggital section of the optic chiasma. Two had all other interhemispheric pathways intact, two had mid-saggital section of fasciculus aberrans and hippocampal and anterior commissures, two had fasciculus aberrans only sectioned, and two had fasciculus aberrans only intact. All were trained monocularly in a visual discrimination task and tested for transfer to the opposite hemisphere. Those with all commissural pathways intact and those with only fasciculus aberrans intact demonstrated transfer. Those with all commissures sectioned and those with only fasciculus aberrans sectioned did not show transfer. It seems probable that integrity of fasciculus aberrans is a necessary and sufficient commissural condition for interhemispheric transfer of visual information in this marsupial.

Organisms trained to respond at a high rate to one stimulus, S1, and at a low rate to another stimulus, S2, lying in the same physical dimension as S1, may, when presented successively with a number of stimuli lying in the dimension, respond at the highest rate to a stimulus away from S1 in a direction opposite S2. This "peak shift" effect has been found following training in which S1 and S2 were presented successively, but not when they were presented simultaneously. In the present study peak shift was obtained when S1 and S2 were presented simultaneously during training. In order to isolate the conditions necessary to produce peak shift after simultaneous training, different groups of pigeons were given variations in procedure, but peak shift was obtained with all groups. The variations included using stimuli from various physical dimensions, using different training procedures, and using various methods of presenting stimuli during the tests for peak shift. The results were generally more consistent with discrimination theories that postulate the interaction of generalisation gradients around S1 and S2, rather than with theories that postulate control by some relationship between S1 and S2, and in particular, they were most consistent with explanations of peak shift that propose that the responding occurring in the presence of S1 is inhibited in the presence of S2.

The logical structure of this thesis demanded a three part presentation. Part I of this thesis provides an historical analysis of global marine ideologies and values, and establishes a framework and justification for the research. The chronological analysis in Part I reveals that humans lived in harmony with the environment throughout most of history. It was not until the twentieth century that technological developments and the burgeoning human population began to take its toll. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries disciplines such as astronomy, physics and chemistry became distinct from philosophy. The most recent discipline to develop has been psychology, a science that is barely one hundred years old. In the past, psychological investigation ignored the natural world until in recent years the new paradigm of environmental psychology has emerged. Expanding on the notion of phenomenological psychology, a systems-oriented approach demands a holistic world view in contrast to analysing parts of a system. From this perspective, the present research adopted a biosocial multidisciplinary approach to the study of the human/marine environment interface. Part II is concerned with the theory and method in the study of marine and coastal environments. The theoretical concept of consumer socialisation assumes that learning takes place during interaction with socialisation agents such as family, peers, cultural influences and the media. To test the paradigm of social learning theory in familial (informal) and peer collaborative (formal) circumstances, two research studies were carried out. First, a three generational sample of five families in Auckland, New Zealand, were interviewed to test intergenerational commonalities and differences in social, cultural and economic values pertaining to marine environmental issues. Content analysis supported the notion that mechanisms associated with consumer socialisation theory were evident in the rhetorical constructs of participants. Predictions that environmentally aware parents and grandparents would have children with similar attitudes, and adjacent generations would have more closely aligned attitudes and beliefs than nonadjacent generations, were supported. Further, interactive dialogue resulted in contradictions and coercion, strategies associated with attitude change within the theoretical model of social learning. The second research study investigated the effects of collaborative learning on cognitive development. In contrast to the systemic approach of experiential learning, the traditional lecture format fails to address the student as a total person. Based on this premise, an interactive simulation game with a focus on marine conservation, and the corresponding effects on learning and behaviour, was developed in the present study. Decisions relating to conservation versus economic development of the marine environment were manipulated by the introduction of role-play in the context of the simulation game, which was based on an imaginary island governed by eight ministries. Following rigorous pilot testing, the final version of the simulation game was field tested with one hundred and fifty-four students aged between twelve and fifteen years at three Auckland, New Zealand, high schools. Results revealed first, a significant effect of role-play on decision-making and second, a significant difference between control and experimental groups in correct answers to knowledge-based questionnaires, confirming the effectiveness of peer interaction through simulation as a teaching device. Students began to construct their own cognitive understanding of environmental issues and problems faced by government departments with divergent agendas. Once this point was reached it was not difficult for participants to consider social, economic and environmental factors in terms of real-life situations. The results of both studies are summarised in the final chapter. Findings revealed that socialisation processes are instrumental in developing orientation towards environmental issues. Furthermore, interpersonal communication has the power to alter cognitive structures. Justification for concern about marine environmental protection, and the urgency associated with the development of educational mechanisms, was evident from the results of this research. Implications for future interaction with marine biosocial systems, limitations of the study and directions for further research, are defined in the closing sections of this thesis.

Three studies were undertaken with high school students, unified by the goal of informing prevention programmes in high schools. The first study used a questionnaire to gather information from 373 students about their experiences of emotional, physical and/or sexual violence across heterosexual dating, peer and family relationships. Although girls and boys reported similar rates of all types of violence, the emotional consequences for girls were more adverse, girls were more likely to talk to someone about it and more likely to terminate the relationship. There was a correlation between violence victimisation in dating relationships and in the family. Experiences of peer violence were similar for boys and girls, although girls reported significantly more sexual harassment and boys significantly more physical violence. The two remaining studies in the research used a discourse analytic approach to examine the talk of students. One study used 12 group interviews in which 101 students were invited to talk about their perceptions of dating relationships and the violence that occurred within them. The key strand in the analysis of this talk was the social construction of masculine and feminine identities. Boys commonly drew on the discourses of naturalness, the sexually driven male and the patriarchal discourse. For girls, the prevailing discourses were the discourse of the body, the discourse of 'emphasised femininity' (traditional femininity) and, as with the boys, the patriarchal discourse. The other study involved analysis of 24 individual interviews with girls, who had themselves been in relationships with boyfriends that involved violence. Their stories were commonly threaded with the romantic narrative, but although girls at times positioned themselves within the passivity of romantic discourse and 'emphasised femininity', they also positioned themselves in the contradictory discourse of feminism. The high levels of reported violence in the questionnaire study supported a need for dating violence prevention programmes in schools as well as suggesting specific areas to target within programmes. The group interview study strongly indicated the need to foster alternative constructions of masculinity and femininity and the individual interview study pointed to the need to alert teenagers to the fusion of love and violence through exposing the trappings of romantic discourse.

Experimental extensions and theoretical explanations of a psychoacoustic experiment concerning temporal summation of human hearing are investigated. The experiment has the well-established result that, ceteris paribus, a brief tone burst is more readily letected than a brief gap in a tone. Two models, one based on the neuroelectrical activity of the auditory nerve and one on energy-detection theory, are presented and developed in detail: both are shown capable of predicting the result of the bursts and gaps experiment. Seven experiments are reported. Experiment 1 found the reaction time to the start of a faint tone embedded in noise generally shorter than that to its end. Experiment 2 examined the effect of rise/decay time on the detectability of brief bursts of, or gaps in, broadband noise: when the energy change was constant, 1here was no effect except at long (100 msec) rise/decay times. Experiments 3 and 4 assessed the detectability of bursts of, and gaps in, a tone embedded in noise where energy change to noise power per cycle was constant but duration varied. The data demonstrate that the effect of duration on detectability was different for burst than gap events, a result predicted by both models. Experiment 5 showed that, when the energy in and duration of a tone burst in noise were constant but the temporal distribution of the burst energy varied, detectability remained unchanged. The repetition rate of noise bursts and gaps in continuous noise was varied without effect on detectability in Experiment 6. Bursts, however, were consistently mere detectable than gaps. Experiment 7 compared the detectability of increments and decrements of a continuous tone embedded in noise. The quantitative predictions of the two models are compared with the data resulting from Experiments 3, 5, and 7. The qualitative results of these and the other experiments are also discussed in terms of their theoretical implications. Taken all together, the experiments do not definitely favour either model over the other.

Background Depictions of mental illnesses in the mass media have been analysed and criticised for more than forty years with little improvement, and that has serious implications for the ongoing efforts to destigmatise both mental illnesses and those who suffer from them. Aims To examine media depictions of mental illnesses within a social constructionist framework. To identify why media depictions take the form they do and to indicate ways in which such practices may be more effectively addressed. Method Items chosen from factual media genres were subjected to discourse analysis. This form of analysis attends to the preferred meaning of the items and how that meaning is constructed within the item. Exemplars of such analysis are contrasted with the content analyses more commonly performed on media materials before reporting analyses of items from everyday media reports and of materials that were expected to be less stigmatising. Results Irrespective of the form of analysis it is found that media depictions of mental illnesses are dominated by representations of dangerousness, criminal violence, unpredictability, and social incompetence. The same features were found in a destigmatisation documentary and a series of backgrounders on mental health services, in both of which madness was utilised to create interest and drama. It is argued that these characteristics occur because media personnel, like most laypersons, represent mental illnesses as forms of madness. Conclusions That my social constructionist analysis is able to account for the lack of change in media depictions over forty years. That the preference for a public mental health approach to destigmatisation is misplaced because it is unable to address the fear generated by lay understandings of mental illnesses. That the attempt to avoid conflation of the person with the disorder in Diagnostic and Statistical Manuals beginning in 1980 was an inadequate step in an appropriate direction in that it sought to remind clinicians that a mental disorder does not make a person non-human. The thesis findings are interpreted as showing that destigmatisation requires a new way of depicting mental illnesses, one that privileges the individual's experience and their ordinary humanness.

This is a description of the phonology, morphology and syntax of Namakir, a language of the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian, which is spoken on some six small islands of the Shepherd Islands, central Vanuatu. My perspective on Namakir is that of a person trained in linguistics, who carried out linguistic fieldwork for the purpose of grammatical description. In addition I contributed to ethnographic work as well as compiling data for a dictionary, part of which is appended to the present description. Namakir is a conservative language which retains many features that make Oceanic languages unique. Thus it is a valuable witness for comparative and reconstructive work in Oceanic linguistics. The physical, social and historical setting of Namakir is detailed in the introductory chapter. A section on theoretical issues concerning the descriptive enterprise is included. The chapter on phonology outlines the Namakir consonant and vowel inventories, with due emphasis on the glottal stop which, as a reflex of the Proto-Oceanic glottal stop, is a unique occurence in Vanuatu languages Sections on phonotactics, stress and phonological processes add to the basic description of segments. In the chapter on morphophonemics the dynamics of derivational processes are explored. A major section deals with consonant alternation, a phenomenon widely discussed in Oceanic Linguistics. The major form classes are detailed in the next chapter. Nominals, determiners, adjectives, verbs and adverbs are established as word categories and paradigm tables are provided for comprehensive overviews. The last chapter on Namakir syntax provides a systematic description of noun phrase and verb phrase. Possessive constructions receive special attention as they exhibit a number of unusual features. The verb phrase is discussed within the framework of the Oceanic definition of verb and periphery which include subject markers as well as pronominal objects. The Namakir mood and aspectual system is presented in detail. A major section deals with serial verb constructions in relation to current descriptive theories. The concluding sections discuss selected items regarding complex sentence structures. Negation and question sentences, existential and comparative sentence types are included. Coordination together with direct and indirect speech is noted to use forms of a quotative verb, being especially significant in the organisation of narrative sequences. Relative and temporal clauses share a single overt marker. A morpheme-to-morpheme glossed narrative is appended to demonstrate narrative style. A substantial Namakir-English-Bislama wordlist is added as a repository of data collected during fieldwork.

Pigeons were studied in concurrent chain schedules in which the terminal links were variable-interval (aperiodic) and fixed-interval (periodic) schedules. Choice was studied at various maintained percentages of body weight, (Experiment 1) and after various amounts of food had been pre-fed (Experiment 2). No effects on choice of the level of deprivation were found except in those choice conditions in which both terminal-link schedules were variable-interval schedules. Choice behaviour was further studied with equal, but increased magazine durations (Experiment 3) and no reliable effects were found. Explicit discrimination training established control over choice behaviour by the amounts pre-fed (Experiment 4) and generalisation gradiets of choice showed that this control was reliable. The differences found between aperiodic and periodic schedules were probably related to the different patterns of behaviour maintained by these schedules and an attempt was made to relate the results to overall models of behaviour and the 'value' of food.

It is often claimed that applied behaviour analysis is founded on basic behavioural concepts involving the direct extrapolation of data from the experimental laboratory to the analysis of human behaviour. It is claimed that such an approach gives theoretical coherence to a set of procedures, and avoids the pitfalls associated with a collection of unrelated techniques. This presumed experimental base is said to make applied behaviour analysis more rigorous, more effective, more systematic, and easier to teach and learn than other approaches to the modification of human behaviour. There is reason to believe, however, that the link between experimental and applied behaviour analysis is more one of commitment than reality. Previous authors have shown that research findings from the experimental analysis of behaviour are becoming increasingly isolated from other areas of psychology in general. The present study provides evidence that such findings are also isolated from applied behaviour analysis in particular. Experimental data are seldom cited in applied work and, when they are, it is seldom specific or current data to which references are made. It is argued that this state of affairs is attributable to the acceptance, by applied behaviour analysis, of a model of behaviour whose complexity is insufficient to cope with the complex interactive nature of human behaviour. The present work provides an outline of the current applied behaviour analytic model, and then proceeds to discuss some of the major types of data of which the model takes no significant account. An extensive examination of data from the experimental analysis of choice behaviour is given, which reveals the level of complexity to which application may be made. Suggestions as to the practical utilization of these data are made, with particular reference to the areas of self-control and commitment. A case study involving the use of a commitment procedure in the treatment of an exhibitionist and another concerning the application of experimentally-derived procedures to a self-control problem, provide clinical evidence of the usefulness of the direct incorporation of experimental data. Following these applied case studies, a number of other areas of experimental research are examined with respect to their relevance to applied behaviour analysis. Significant data from the study of multiple-schedule interactions, stimulus control, and two specific types of analyses of reinforcement phenomena are outlined and suggestions made concerning their applied potential. Further, data which could determine the limits of the applicability of experimental data, in the context of biological constraints on behaviour, are shown to be capable of further increasing the utility of applied behaviour analytic techniques. Finally, the implications of the data analyzed are discussed in terms of the future training of applied behaviour analysts.