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Children born prematurely are at higher risk for medical, learning and developmental concerns than children born full term. This study analysed the files of 73 pre-term children who completed an Assessment and Monitoring programme in New Zealand between 1998 and 2007. The participants were 39 boys and 34 girls with gestational ages ranging from 23 weeks to 32 weeks at birth and who attended the programme until they were 4 years chronological age. Analysis of the reports sent to paediatricians following the children’s monitoring visits at 8 months, 12 months, 18 months, 24 months and 36 months (corrected age) and at 48 months, chronological age indicated delays in achieving the expected developmental milestones in expressive language, cognition and gross motor skills for up to half of the cohort. Moreover, the findings further suggest that a ‘sleeper effect’ or ‘invisible prematurity’ emerged for up to half of the cohort at age 36 months. This ‘invisible prematurity’ and the developmental delay in cognition, expressive language and gross motor skills have implications for early childhood teachers as teachers need to develop an awareness of, and skills to identify and work effectively with these young children and their families. Practical teaching and learning strategies are presented for teachers.

The Visible and the Invisible: Connecting Presence and Absence Through Art, Memory, Mortality and the Body investigates the role that art objects and images used in installation practice have in linking the past to the present. The project's creative and theoretical research speculatively explore and interpret the potential that such objects--in my art practice and in the work of a range of noted visual artists--have in evoking ideas, memories or physical ties that are not readily apparent. The studio and theoretical research examines how a range of visual mechanisms in installation practice can evoke (in present time) past events and experiences previously absent. In the research, memory is revealed as having the capacity to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, acting as a powerful catalyst that connects a viewer's awareness of a past experience to the visible objects experienced through a visual installation.

The Piagetian invisible displacement task has been used extensively in the filed of comparative cognition to measure representational capacity. In the task a desirable object is hidden beneath one of several hiding boxes via a displacement device, such as a small opaque container. Success on the task is deemed to require that the invisible trajectory of the object be mentally represented and its current location inferred. That is, the task is supposed to measure the ability to “think” of something that is occurring outside of direct perception. However, simple associative strategies may also lead to success in the absence of stringent control conditions. Among mammals, only great apes and domestic dogs have consistently performed above chance on the invisible displacement task. There is much converging evidence from other tasks to suggest that great apes have a capacity for representational thought. However, dogs have shown few signs of possessing the representational abilities generally though necessary to pass the task. Thus, in Chapter 2, four experiments investigated how dogs (n=35) find an object that has been invisibly displaced behind one of three opaque boxes under four control conditions devised to separate associative search strategies from performance based on mental representation. Strategies involving experimenter cue-use, search at the last or first box visited by the displacement device, and search at boxes adjacent to the displacement device were systematically controlled for. Dogs passed invisible displacement’s but only if the device used to displace the object was adjacent to the target box following displacements. These results suggest that the search behaviour of dogs was guided by simple associative rules rather than mental representation of past trajectory of the object. In contrast, Experiment 5 found that, on the same task, 18- and 24-moth-old children (n=21) showed no disparity between trials in which the displacement device was adjacent or non-adjacent to the target box. In Chapter 3, two chimpanzees were tested on single invisible displacements under the same four control conditions that were administered to dogs. In contract to dogs, chimpanzees showed no indication of utilizing these simple strategies, suggesting that their capacity to mentally represent single invisible displacements is comparable to that of 18- to 24-month-old children. Chapter 4 followed up reports of children and apes’ difficulty with double invisible displacements in which an object is hidden at two non-adjacent boxes in a linear array. Experiment 1 eliminated the possibility that chimpanzees’ previous poor performance was due to the hiding direction of the displacement device. Subjects failed double non-adjacent displacements, showing a tendency to select adjacent boxes. In Experiments 2 and 3, chimpanzees and 24-month-old children were tested on a new adaptation of the task involving four hiding boxes presented in a diamond-shaped array on a vertical plane. Both species performed above change on double invisible displacements using this format, suggesting that previous poor performance was due to a response bias or inhibition problem rather than a fundamental limitation in representational capacity. In Chapter 5, I conducted a pilot study examining the performance of siamangs and a spider monkey on single and double invisible displacements. Performance was mixed but provides some promising evidence that invisible displacements are within the capacity of siamangs. In contrast to siamangs and chimpanzees, but like dogs, the spider monkey showed a significant tendency to search at a box adjacent to the displacement device on simple invisible displacements. However, the spider monkey performed above chance on an impromptu test of single invisible displacements presented in the vertical format. Further study is needed to eliminate alternative associative strategies in these two species. In Chapter 6, I discuss the findings of the study with dogs, chimpanzees, 2-year-old children, siamangs, and a spider monkey on invisible displacement understanding. The results highlight the importance of associative strategies and inhibition problems. The thesis presents strong evidence of stage 6 invisible displacement understanding, and thus representational thought, in chimpanzees and 2-year-old children, but suggests that dogs are capable of only stage 5 objective permanence understanding.

En 1982, Ingmar Bergman avait pris la décision d’arrêter le cinéma avec une œuvre qu’il voulait ultime : Fanny et Alexandre. Il ne tint pas tout à fait parole et continua à réaliser des œuvres pour la télévision, ce qu’était déjà Fanny et Alexandre. Une fresque de 5h40, film somme et sommet cinématographique. Notre travail souhaite comprendre la complexité d’une œuvre qui renferme à elle seule tous les motifs du cinéaste. Notre désir est de l’étudier sous l’angle de deux notions : le visible et l’invisible. Ces notions viennent d’emblée interroger la présence et l’absence, le plein et le vide, le conscient et l’inconscient, le blanc, couleur de la transparence, et le rouge, celle de l’intérieur de l’âme. Il semble donc que les notions de visible et invisible sondent un univers clivé à l’image d’une œuvre qui, dans sa narration même, oppose la troupe de théâtre à la solitude de l’évêque, la foi dans l’imaginaire à la foi en Dieu, l’enfance à la vieillesse, la vie à la mort, le bien au mal, l’eau de la rivière au feu qui brûle vif le « diable ». Mais notre propos est de tenter de dépasser cette opposition formelle pour parvenir à démontrer sa réversibilité. Les dimensions de visible et d’invisible apparaissent finalement non comme duales mais complémentaires, elles sont un endroit et un envers, où l’invisible est la profondeur du visible. Nous supposons que cette réversibilité, c’est-à-dire un lien qui organise les opposés en manifestant en même temps leur interdépendance, montre comment l’esthétique baroque gouverne le cinéma bergmanien. / In 1982, Ingmar Bergman had decided to stop making movies with a piece of work he considered as final – Fanny and Alexander. He didn’t quite keep his word, and kept directing TV works – which he had already started to do with Fanny and Alexander. A 5h40-long epic, a comprehensive piece of work and a cinematic pinnacle. Our research tries to understand the complexity of a piece of work enclosing all of the filmmaker’s motifs. We wish to study it through two notions: the visible and the invisible. These notions immediately question the present and the absent, the full and the empty, the conscious and the unconscious, the white– the color of transparency –, and red as representing the inside of the soul. It thus seems that the notions of visible and invisible probe a divided universe, reflecting a piece of work which, in its very narrative, brings into opposition the theater troupe and the bishop’s solitude, belief in fantasy and faith in God, childhood and old age, life and death, right and wrong, the river stream and the fire that burns “the devil”… Yet, we wish to go beyond this formal opposition to demonstrate its reversibility. Indeed, the dimensions of the visible and the invisible eventually appear as being complementary rather than dual: they represent one side and its reverse, the invisible is the visible’s depth. From our study of the paradigmatic duo “the visible and the invisible”, we assume a reversibility, i.e. a bond that both structures opposites and brings out their interdependence – thus showing how baroque aesthetics reign over Bergman’s cinema.

This thesis examines portrayals of gaslighting toward women in American film. Gaslighting, a form of psychological manipulation that frequently targets women, has a long history in cinema, and narratives that foreground the practice have developed a series of narrative and stylistic conventions. These conventions frequently simplify the realities of psychological abuse toward women, representing gaslighting and its perpetrators with ideologically patriarchal undertones. Such undertones have changed over time, often in ways that reflect cultural and political shifts within American society. Gaslight films’ female protagonists have demonstrated more agency, while the perpetrators have grown steadily more monstrous as the subgenre shifted from a melodramatic to horrific mode. Using a genre studies approach to survey these constantly evolving tropes across three eras, I argue that the gaslight film is a subgenre that reflects growing attitudes toward and awareness of gender roles and psychological abuse towards women. Concerns involving representations of female agency and the ability of genres to concisely communicate hegemonic, patriarchal ideologies lie beneath this analysis.

Research in scholarly communication is usually limited to the use and dissemination of scientific material by scholars. This excludes the transfer of knowledge from research producers to service providers. Some may argue the primary function of science is to investigate the conditions in the lab so everyday interactions with the environment are more effective and efficient. This is the underlying philosophy of the science of behavior analysis. Comprised of a basic science, an applied science and a philosophy the field of behavior analysis relies on research developments to inform effective practice. Guided by dissemination processes studied in information science, this investigation revealed the content layer in behavior analysis is primarily comprised of journal articles. Ninety four percent of the research artifacts cited in the current content layer are from journal articles. Other dissemination channels used to develop the behavior analytic content layer included scientific magazine articles, oral reports, dissertations and theses, and unpublished manuscripts. The information use environment for professionals in this field is very different than that of the scholars; most professionals do not have access to a university library. Therefore, the research producers are disseminating developments via communication channels some service providers cannot access. This investigation reveals the only dissemination channel that provides continuous access to the content layer is reaching out via informal communication; All other dissemination channels do not provide access to the entire content layer, do not provide the entire scholarly work, and/or include a barrier to access (often an associated cost). This is a concern for the field of behavior analysis as professional recommendations cannot be based on the best available evidence if the evidence is not accessible. This is a concern for the field of information science as the study of scholarly communication should not be limited to scholars alone. The process of scholarly dissemination should be extended to include alternate information use environments of other populations.

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