Face adaptation techniques have been used extensively to investigate how faces are processed. It has even been suggested that face adaptation is functional in calibrating the visual system to the diet of faces to which an observer is exposed. Yet most adaptation studies to date have used unfamiliar faces: few have used faces with real world familiarity. Familiar faces have more abstractive representations than unfamiliar faces. The experiments in this thesis therefore examined face adaptation for familiar faces. Chapters 2 and 3 explored the role of explicit recognition of familiar faces in producing face identity after-effects (FIAEs). Chapter 2 used composite faces (the top half of a celebrity's face paired with the bottom half of an unfamiliar face) as adaptors and showed that only recognised composites produced significant adaptation. In Chapter 3 the adaptors were cryptic faces (unfamiliar faces subtly transformed towards a celebrity's face) and faces of celebrity's siblings. Unrecognised cryptic and sibling faces produced FIAEs for their related celebrity, but only when adapting and testing on the same viewpoint. Adaptation only transferred across viewpoint when a face was explicitly recognised. Chapter 4 demonstrated that face adaptation could occur for ecologically valid, personally familiar stimuli, a necessary pre-requisite if adaptation is functional in calibrating face processing mechanisms. A video of a lecturer's face produced FIAEs equivalent to that produced by static images. Chapters 5 and 6 used a different type of after-effect, the face distortion after-effect (FDAE), to explore the stability of our representations for personally familiar faces, and showed that even representations of highly familiar faces can be affected by exposure to distorted faces. The work presented here shows that it is important to take facial familiarity into account when investigating face adaptation effects, as well as increasing our understanding of how familiarity affects the representations of faces.

In human fear conditioning 'resistance to extinction' occurs when the removal of the aversive outcome fails to produce a reduction in conditioned responding. This phenomenon is important to understanding the persistence of anxiety disorders such as phobias. The research presented in this thesis examines factors that promote the acquisition and maintenance of learned fear response and attempts to differentiate between different explanations of the resistance to extinction phenomenon. To investigate the impact of different conditioning procedures (evaluative or classical conditioning) on the durability of the conditioned response (CR), event-related potential (ERP) methodology was employed. In addition, the role of the fear-relevance of the conditioned stimulus (CS), in supporting the acquisition and resistance to extinction of the CR, was explored. Evidence suggested that extinction effects are likely to reflect procedural differences in conditioning rather than different underlying learning processes. Extinction effects were dissociable across procedures, supporting the role of the type of unconditioned stimulus (US) in explaining past demonstrations of extinction when responses were indexed by physiological measures. Verbally transmitted, threat information heightened aversive US-expectancies and fear beliefs without the need for conditioning. Additionally, fear-beliefs were reduced without the need for extinction training when positive information was provided. Contrary to Davey's (1997) expectancy bias model, the results do not support the hypothesis that verbal information interacts with direct contingency experience to create fear responses; instead, information appears to be a direct pathway to fear. ERP measures for fear responses did not echo the effects of verbal information and contingency on fear-beliefs. However, the comparability of our ERP data, to other research using physiological measures of response, is discussed regarding the number of trials required to calculate the average ERP response. Due to averaging over a large number of trials the ERP measure may not be sensitive to fluctuations in response that may be dependent on information or contingency manipulations. In conclusion our data suggests the importance of verbal information as a pathway to fear and the role of cognitive factors in the prevention and treatment of fears.

The extent to which conscious and unconscious mental processes contribute to our experiences of learning and the subsequent knowledge has been subject to great debate. Dual process theories of implicit learning and recognition memory bear many resemblances, but there are also important differences. This thesis uses subjective measures of awareness to explore these themes using the artificial grammar learning (AGL) and remember/know (R/K) procedures. Firstly, the relationship between response times associated with intuition and familiarity based responding (conscious judgment of unconscious structural knowledge) compared to rule and recollection based responding (conscious structural knowledge) in AGL were found to be strikingly similar to remembering and knowing; their R/K analogues. However, guessing (unconscious judgment knowledge) was also distinct from intuition and familiarity based responding. Secondly, implicit learning in AGL was shown to occur at test, which would not be expected in R/K. Finally, wider theories of cognition, unconscious thought and verbal overshadowing, were shown to have measurable effects on AGL and R/K respectively. The approach used in this thesis shows the merits of both in-depth analysis within a given method combined with the synthesis of seemingly disparate theories. This thesis has built upon the important distinction between conscious and unconscious structural knowledge but also suggests the conscious-unconscious division for judgment knowledge may be as important. Implicit learning and recognition memory tasks differ in the kinds of mental processes that subjective measures are sensitive toward; particularly so in situations where judgment knowledge is unconscious. Different theories and methods divide nature in different ways; the conscious-unconscious judgment distinction may prove an important one.

This thesis examines the relevance of Hegelian-Marxian theory to modern day philosophy of cognitive science. It is suggested that certain key Hegelian-Marxian ideas and themes, such as 'externalization', 'praxis' and 'dialectics', have parallels in modern day cognitive science and that, in some instances a direct connection can be traced from Marxian theory to recent cognitive science, via intermediaries such as Vygotsky, Merleau-Ponty and Levins & Lewontin. It is also suggested that the overarching trajectory of cognitive science is one that can be usefully understood in Marxian terms as a 'retreat from alienation.' Taking this as one's starting point enables one to unify otherwise disparate perspectives under a single banner. In addition it provides one with a means of evaluating individual accounts, such as Varela, Thompson and Rosch's 'Embodied Mind' and Clark and Chalmers' 'Extended Mind'. Conversely, some recent cognitive scientific accounts, such as Kirsh & Maglio's work on 'epistemic action', offer further illumination of ideas that are ambiguously expressed in Marxian theory.

Pause analysis is a method that investigates processes of writing by measuring the amount of time between pen strokes. It provides the field of second language studies with a means to explore the cognitive processes underpinning the nature of writing. This study examined the potential of using free handwritten copying of sentences as a means of investigating components of the cognitive processes of adults who have English as their Second Language (ESL). A series of one pilot and three experiments investigated possible measures of language skill and the factors that influence the quality of the measures. The pilot study, with five participants of varying English competence, identified copying without pre-reading to be an effective task and ‘median' at the beginning of words to be an effective measure. Experiment 1 (n=20 Malaysian speakers) found jumbled sentences at the letter and word levels to effectively differentiate test-taker competence in relation to grammatical knowledge. Experiment 2 (n=20 Spanish speakers) investigated the jumbling effects further, but found that participants varied their strategy depending on the order of the sentence types. As a result, Experiment 3 (n= 24 Malaysian speakers) used specific task instructions to control participant strategy use, so that they either attended to the meaning of the sentences, or merely copied as quickly as possible. Overall, these experiments show that it is feasible to apply pause analysis to cognitively investigate both grammar and vocabulary components of language processing. Further, a theoretical information processing model of copying (MoC) was developed. The model assists in the analysis and description of (1) the flow of copying processes; (2) the factors that might affect longer or shorter pauses amongst participants of varying competence level; and (3) sentence stimuli design.

Through the evolution of digital media technology, social networks and more recently Web 3.0 (e.g. Cloud-based) technologies, culture and memory is being transformed, both in relation to how memories are represented, and how they may be engaged with or re-accessed. As digital technology alters ways in which knowledge is produced, stored, connected and shared, new terrains, tools and artefacts are formed; new cultural practices alter the ways in which we remember and the ways in which memory is processed, destabilising traditional “historically encoded social habits: religion, authority, morality, traditional values, or political ideology” (Diamantaki 2013). This doctoral project consists of two parts exploring questions of memory in contemporary time. The practice work submitted develops various imaginaries and investigates how to enable mnemonic practices so that works function as memory palaces where bodies and ‘collective' and ‘networked memories' (Hoskins, 2010) can be realised. The work, briefly summarised, includes communal activities in public spaces (a series of workshops and heritage day events, Rendezvous, centrally social activities organised between Fabrica and various charitable organisations in Brighton). It includes a series of installation works, as a transitional process of memory between body, object, an investigation of ubiquitous technology, are investigated – iremembr (2009-15); Rendezvous (2010-15); Untitled#21 (2012). And it leads to the development of an installation piece, 200.104.200.2 (2013-15), that seeks to offer or extend the possibilities of the act of remembering, of memory, as a post-Internet experience; a complex temporal, social, spatial and material, overlapping and merging human and silicon memory. In this, the written component of the combined and larger project, questions concerning memory and digital technology, and how to explore them, are taken up in theoretical terms, and the works I have produced returned to and explored in these contexts. A central project here has been to locate new forms of qualities of ‘digital' memory in a memory map or topology that builds on adapts, and develops other models. Aspects of zones of memory are explored centrally in each of the later thesis chapters each of which also takes up a particular aspect of my practice. The intention – and the contribution to the development of critical thinking around the digital – particularly critical thinking that comes through digital media art practice, is to question how digital technology intervenes in the process of memory; how the concept of digital memory is being thought about; leading me to investigate what does this new digital terrain do as it overlaps and re-writes to some extent the older ones? How does it change ‘how memory happens'.

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