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Eleven experiments are reported which examine the effects of 90 dB (A) white noise on the processes which govern orienting of attention in visual space. The selectivity hypothesis argues that noise alters the priorities which govern stimulus selection so that subjectively dominant aspects of the environment are attended to more fully than those which are non-dominant. The applicability of this hypothesis is examined with regard to attentional orienting. Three experimental paradigms are used. The first involves a central cue presented immediately prior to target onset. In the absence of eye movements reaction times to expected targets are faster than to unexpected targets, but noise has no effects on performance. It is concluded that the power of the central alerting cue is focussing attention in a maximal fashion and noise has no further effect on policies of allocation. A second task design involves the presentation of positional information prior to a block of trials. Under such conditions subjects fail to maintain orienting as trials continue. Noise enhances the ability to maintain orienting over time. This effect is discussed in the light of the selectivity hypothesis. It is argued that the inability to maintain orienting is not due to the inhibition which arises as a result of successive responding. Rather it is due to the difficulty involved in maintaining an active orientation. The third paradigm involves orienting to specific locations on the basis of information stored in short-term memory. When recall of this information is aided by a visual warning signal occurring prior to target onset noise has no effect on performance. Without this signal, noise alters performance and these data are compared to predictions based upon the selectivity hypothesis. These effects are discussed in terms of a noise-induced change in the strategy of performance, rather than an effect which is mechanistic.

<p>We live in a society that continually reinforces the connection between femininity and maternity and for the majority of women, attempts to experience motherhood are successful. However, for others the world of motherhood is not so easy to enter. To date, research regarding the needs and life satisfaction of women who are unsuccessful in becoming mothers, is fairly limited. The purpose of this study was to explore the transitional phase women endure from potential motherhood to non-motherhood and to highlight some of the complexities underpinning infertility and its impact on the lives of women in South Africa. The main objective was to gain deeper insight into how women incorporated this experience into their lives and relationships and how they began to create a future life without their own biological children. A secondary aim of this study was to investigate whether the women viewed aspects such as age and finances as having had an effect on their decision to discontinue treatment for infertility. Feminist standpoint theory served as a theoretical framework for the study that recognized that each individual voice be heard. This study was a qualitative exploration, utilizing a short demographic questionnaire and an in-depth semi-structured interview. Five interviews were conducted with women from diverse backgrounds. These interviews were recorded / transcribed verbatim and thematic analysis of the data was conducted.</p>

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This thesis seeks to explore the way in which invisibility as a concept becomes explicitly housed within digital compositing, visual effects (VFX) and certain attendant techniques. The chapters will establish how compositing and effects techniques can be seen as pushing modern filmmaking into concealing, and therefore visually releasing, certain physical structures within films’ images and their production. This shall be achieved by drawing upon a combination of texts that disseminate the technical nature and make-up of VFX, alongside discussion and theorisation of their use within cinema, together with other established film theory. I will examine cases of VFX techniques within cinema that can be used to investigate how their construction and utilisation create invisibility to accommodate and nullify the profilmic elements captured through the camera and aspects of technology. The chapters begin by examining how the work of Georges Méliès, whose films use the concept of invisibility to promote a breakdown of temporal and spatial qualities, become redeployed in certain modern digital effects-based films. Expanding on this, the second chapter explores how theories surrounding realism as espoused through mise-en-scène and the so-called physical “truth” of the captured world can be rearticulated through VFX both optical and digital. Chapter three looks at how breaking down the physical structure of a performer through VFX and motion-capture result in characterisations that produce a sense of ghostliness, where the Bazinian mummification of photographic capture has new existence breathed into it. Finally, chapter four explores how recent developments in effects techniques in creating the Invisible Man act as a reflection of the physical body unbound in a digital world. Here, the digital infrastructure of modern culture, such as the Internet, is used to highlight how a more free-flowing and vivacious body can exist and make use of unseen and non-physical practices to commit nefarious acts, such as hacking. It is these aspects that become reflected in the most recent film iteration of the Invisible Man, Hollow Man (2000).