Alison Bowling

• Ph.D.
• Lecturer at Southern Cross University

Public participation in science is burgeoning, yet little is known about factors that influence potential volunteers. We present results from a national survey of 1,145 marine users to uncover the drivers and barriers to a sightings-based, digital marine citizen science project. Knowledge of marine species is the most significant barrier and driver...

Plastic pollution is a significant problem in all oceans of the world and accounts for up to 90% of marine debris. Ingestion of plastic by seabirds and its effects are well documented, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. However, fewer data exist for levels of plastic in seabird and coastal bird species in Australian waters or the southwestern...

Shark fisheries have expanded due to increased demand for shark products. As long-lived apex predators, sharks are susceptible to bioaccumulation of metals and metalloids, and biomagnification of some such as Hg, primarily through diet. This may have negative health implications for human consumers. Concentrations of Hg, As, Cd, Cu, Fe, Se and Zn w...

Saccadic eye movements take place when the eyes are moved rapidly from one location in space to another. They are generally reflexive, taking place subconsciously when a scene is scanned, or when someone looks at an object which captures attention. Saccades can be inhibited when an alternative response is required, or when it is necessary to focus...

Problem gambling has been identified as a public health concern in Australia, and a considerable proportion of regular gamblers may be at risk of developing gambling related problems. Attentional bias to salient cues has been observed in substance addictions, and to some extent, in problem gamblers. This bias appears to be indicative of an increase...

Older adults appear to have greater difficulty ignoring distractions during day-to-day activities than younger adults. To assess these effects of age, the ability of adults aged between 50 and 80 years to ignore distracting stimuli was measured using the antisaccade and oculomotor capture tasks. In the antisaccade task, observers are instructed to...

Saccadic eye movements take place when the eyes are moved rapidly from one location in space to another. They are generally reflexive, taking place subconsciously when a scene is scanned, or when someone looks at an object which captures attention. Saccades can be inhibited when an alternative response is required, or when it is necessary to focus...

With expectations of academic staff to achieve high quality teaching and research outputs as performance measures it is timely to explore how staff perceive they are being supported to meet these ends. This article presents findings of a multi-method study that explored influences impacting on the quality and quantity of scholarly activity being un...

The relations among spatial memory, Stroop-like colour-word subtests, and errors on antisaccade and memory-guided saccadic eye-movement trials for older and younger adults were tested. Two types of errors in the antisaccade task were identified: short latency prosaccade errors that were immediately corrected and longer latency uncorrected prosaccad...

Recently, saccadic eye movement tasks have been used to assess the effects of nicotine on higher cognitive processes, including inhibitory control. Saccadic task switching methods suggest that there is prolonged inhibition of the saccadic eye movement system following antisaccade trials. The objective of this research was to examine effects of nico...

Objective: To examine the effectiveness of the introduction of a community mental health team on consumer psychosocial outcomes. Design: Longitudinal panel design. Setting: District general hospital in a semi-rural region of Australia. Numbers: Two matched groups (n = 37 in each group) Main outcome measure: These included: Brief Psychiatric Rating...

Although the occurrence of visual processing and eye-movement disorders in schizophrenia have been widely recognized, their relationship with the symptoms of schizophrenia is less well understood. In two experiments the relationship between directional-motion processing and smooth-pursuit eye movement was investigated in normal observers and in gro...

While research has established a critical relationship between body-image shame and eating disorder symptomatology, no studies have examined factors contributing to body-image shame. As such, the present study assessed the contributions of internalisation of the thin ideal, appearance-related teasing, physical appearance-related comparisons, global...

Objectives: To measure the effects of game outcome on pleasant and unpleasant emotions and stress during elite-level competition.Design: Quasi-experimental repeated pre- and post-game measurement in a field setting.Methods: Participants were 16 members of the Japanese women’s field hockey team playing a world cup preliminary qualifying tournament i...

With the advent of community care many relatives of mentally ill people have become family care givers. Substantial burdens are associated with caring for a mentally ill relative living in the community and these may be compounded in rural areas where mental health programs are often under-resourced and poorly developed. ‘Burden’ refers to the dema...

To examine the effectiveness of the introduction of a community mental health team on consumer psychosocial outcomes. Longitudinal panel design. District general hospital in a semi-rural region of Australia. NUMBERS: Two matched groups (n = 37 in each group) These included: Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS), Global Assessment Scale (GAS), Rosen...

Patients on a first admission for bipolar disorder often have a history of other psychiatric diagnoses for previous admissions. The current study examines the time course and diagnoses of psychiatric admissions prior and subsequent to a first hospitalisation for a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. The prior admission histories (over the period 1965-19...

Objective: To examine the effectiveness of the introduction of a community mental health team on consumer psychosocial outcomes. Design: Longitudinal panel design. Setting: District general hospital in a semi-rural region of Australia. Numbers: Two matched groups (n = 37 in each group) Main outcome measure: These included: Brief Psychiatric Rating...

This study investigates the psychiatric and social outcomes of treatment by the psychiatric unit of a district general hospital in a semirural region of Australia. The study is a naturalistic investigation of a routine clinical service, and utilizes a longitudinal panel design. Repeat interviews at admission, 1 month and 1 year later were conducted...

Objective: The aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of the addition of standard community treatment to a hospital-based service in a regional district of Australia. Method: The study was a naturalistic investigation of a routine clinical service and utilized a longitudinal panel design. Two matched groups of seriously mentally ill p...

Speed of information processing as measured by various reaction time and inspection tasks has been shown to correlate with psychometric intelligence, and it has been suggested that general intelligence (g) is determined to some degree by the speed that information is processed. If this is so, then various measures of speed of information processing...

Measures of vocabulary, digit span, and pattern-contrast sensitivity for low- to medium-spatial-frequency gratings were collected from 123 representative prereaders. A multiple regression analysis showed that these were moderate predictors of reading ability 2 years later. The contrast-sensitivity measure made a significant unique contribution to t...

Three experiments, in which the temporal and spatial characteristics of square-wave gratings surrounding a central test field were varied, are reported. The detection thresholds of 1-sec presentations of a 5-Hz counterphase flickering.5-cycle/deg (cpd) sinusoidal grating were measured under the different surround conditions. Threshold was found to...

Contrast sensitivity functions were obtained in the presence of temporally modulated surrounds. Sensitivity to low spatial frequencies was depressed below that found with a steady surround when the surround was either a sinusoidally flickering field or a drifting vertical square-wave grating. This effect was observed both with 1-sec presentations o...

Bodily restorative theories of sleep predict that physical exercise results in elevated levels of slow wave sleep (SWS). However the evidence is contradictory. A number of hypotheses have been proposed to accomodate the negative results. Two of these proposals are tested in the present paper. The first argues that under various circumstances stress...

A number of studies have reported that physically fit individuals have more slow wave sleep (SWS) than unfit individuals on nights following non-exercise days. However these studies have failed to control for residual exercise effects from previous days. The present study was designed to replicate the original finding and to determine if the report...

Two recent papers (Coltheart, 1980; Long, 1980) have evaluated literature on the relationship between "iconic memory" and "visible persistence." In doing this, both writers focused on methods of measurement of these phenomena and the influence on them of luminance and duration. On the basis of his literature review, Coltheart (p. 210) concluded "th...

Contrast sensitivity functions for normal and specifically disabled readers were measured in two experiments. Each study showed that specifically disabled readers and controls differ in the pattern of relative sensitivity across spatial frequencies. Both studies provide evidence of differences between normal and disabled readers on measures of visu...

It has been hypothesised, that visible persistence consists of two components, one of which was identified with temporal integration and thought to occur at the peripheral level of the visual system. The second component may occur at later stages of visual processing. These hypotheses were investigated by examining the effect of orientation upon pe...

Contrast thresholds for sine-wave gratings of spatial frequencies of 2, 4, 12, and 16 cycles per degree were determined for normal and disabled readers at a range of stimulus durations. Normal readers demonstrated monotonically decreasing sensitivity with increasing spatial frequency at exposure durations between 40 and 100 milliseconds. At exposur...

The persistence of gratings varying in spatial frequency and exposure duration was measured using a stimulus-blank alternation method. Persistence was found to lengthen with increasing spatial frequency and to shorten with increasing exposure duration. For each spatial frequency, persistence decreased linearly with a slope of approximately —.75 as...

Stanley, Howell, and Smith (1980) present an alternative analysis of the persistence data obtained by Bowling and Lovegrove (1980). They argue that stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) is a more appropriate measure of persistence than interstimulus interval (ISI). In addition, they propose that the use of this measure alters the conclusion made by Bowli...

It is controversial whether the magnitude of the motion aftereffect is greater when both inspection and test stimuli are the same color rather than different colors (color selectivity). The present experiments show that the extent of color selectivity in the classical motion aftereffect depends upon (1) the duration of the interval between inspecti...

The visual persistence of sinusoidal gratings of varying spatial frequency and contrast was measured. It was found that the persistence of low-contrast gratings was longer than that of high-contrast stimuli for all spatial frequencies investigated. At higher contrast levels of 1 and 4 cycles deg-1 gratings, a tendency for persistence to be independ...