Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 41-44). Also available on the Internet.

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This thesis presents a model of a narrow faculty for music - qualities that are at once universally present and operational in music across cultures whilst also being specific to our species and to the domain of music. The comparative approach taken focuses on core psychological and physiological capabilities that root and enable appropriate engagement with music rather than on their observable physical correlates. Configurations of musical pulse; musical tone; and musical motivation are described as providing a sustained attentional structure for managing personal experience and interpersonal interaction and as offering a continually renewing phenomenological link between the immediate past, the perceptual present and future expectation. Constituent parts of the narrow faculty for music are considered most fundamentally as a potentiating, quasi-architectural framework in which our most central affective and socio-intentional drives are afforded extended time, stability, and a degree of abstraction, intensity, focus and meaning. The author contends, therefore, that music's defining characteristics, specific functionalities and/or situated efficacies are not demarcated in broadly termed "musical" qualities such as melodic contour or rhythm or in those surprisingly elusive "objective facts" of musical structure. Rather they are solely the attentional/motivational frameworks which root our faculty to make and make sense of music. Our generic capacities for culture and the manifold uses of action, gesture, and sound to express and induce emotion; to regulate affective states; to create or reflect meaning; to signify; to ritualize; coordinate; communicate; interrelate; embody; entrain; and/or intentionalize, none of these is assessed as being intrinsically unique to music performance. Music is, instead, viewed as an ordered expression of human experience, behaviour, interaction, and vitality, all shaped, shared, given significance, and/or transformed in time. The relevance of this model to topical debates on music and evolution is discussed and the author contends that the perspective offered affords significant implications for our understanding of why music is evidently and remarkably effective in certain settings and in the pursuit of certain social, individual, and therapeutic goals.

Eight experiments examined the role of the intertrial interval in the extinction of conditioned fear to a context. Rats were shocked in one context (A) but not in another (B) and freezing responses to Context A were extinguished. The interval between extinction trials was spent in the home cages. Experiments 1a and 1b showed that massed extinction trials produced better response loss but worse learning than spaced trials. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the interval between the final extinction trial and test mediated the level of responding on a test exposure. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that the duration of the extinction trial affected long term response loss, whereby long durations facilitate response loss compared to shorter durations. Subsequent experiments (Experiments 5 to 8) demonstrated that the first in the series of massed extinction trials reduced the associability of subsequent trials. Associability was restored by alternating extinction trials between Context A and Context B. The results are discussed in terms of the role accorded to self-generated priming in the models developed by A. R. Wagner (1978; 1981).

Eight experiments examined the role of the intertrial interval in the extinction of conditioned fear to a context. Rats were shocked in one context (A) but not in another (B) and freezing responses to Context A were extinguished. The interval between extinction trials was spent in the home cages. Experiments 1a and 1b showed that massed extinction trials produced better response loss but worse learning than spaced trials. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the interval between the final extinction trial and test mediated the level of responding on a test exposure. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that the duration of the extinction trial affected long term response loss, whereby long durations facilitate response loss compared to shorter durations. Subsequent experiments (Experiments 5 to 8) demonstrated that the first in the series of massed extinction trials reduced the associability of subsequent trials. Associability was restored by alternating extinction trials between Context A and Context B. The results are discussed in terms of the role accorded to self-generated priming in the models developed by A. R. Wagner (1978; 1981).

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Psychology, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Title from title page of PDF (University of Missouri--St. Louis, viewed February 16, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-50).

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, February 2008.

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of St Andrews, June 2009. / Restricted until 22nd June 2011.

Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia State University, 2006. / Title from title screen. David A. Washburn, committee chair; Michael J. Beran, Eric J. Vanman, Heather M. Kleider, Roger K. R. Thompson, committee members. Electronic text (84 p.) : digital, PDF file. Description based on contents viewed May 14, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-84).