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The thesis investigates international law and jurisdiction over illegal drug trafficking vessels on the high seas. Illegal drug trafficking is prevalent, with, for example, States reporting record drug seizures from Drug Trafficking Vessels [DTVs] when they are interdicted on the high seas. Transnational organized crime groups also adopt new and more sophisticated methods for drug smuggling, such as the use of self-propelled semisubmersible craft ['narco-submarines'], intentionally flagging vessels to State's with open registers, or not flagging vessels at all, leaving them stateless. Therefore, in consideration of all these factors, a fundamental research question emerges concerning DTV interdictions on the high seas, namely: whether and, if so, the extent to which, the international law of the sea, as set out in the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea [LOSC] and relevant customary international law, provide an adequate legal framework for the interdiction of DTVs on the high seas. That said, the law of the sea is not the only body of law addressing drug trafficking at sea. The 1988 Vienna Convention is a significant transnational crime convention that considers this recurrent problem, which has given rise to additional agreements at the regional and bilateral levels. As such, the thesis considers the adequacy of this web of agreements for states seeking to exercise criminal jurisdiction over DTVs on the high seas. Through a doctrinal analysis of these agreements, the research identifies gaps in the law; for example: both the 1988 Vienna Convention and the LOSC are silent on the question of the exercise of criminal jurisdiction over vessels on the high seas. Similarly, the use of vessels without nationality in drug trafficking exposes further gaps in the applicable law. This underscores the practical implications of these doctrinal lacunae; indeed, they manifest every day when States are conducting high seas interdictions. Therefore, the thesis moves beyond a strict doctrinal analysis to incorporate empirical data gathered from practitioners in the field. The empirical data furthers the doctrinal research by identifying how some States overcome the lacunae in the relevant law. Of note here is the contemporary approach of the U.S. to high seas interdictions, in part as the accepted global leader in DTV interdictions. As such, the thesis reviews this approach, relative to the relevant international law, which also captures an assessment of bilateral drug interdiction agreements, domestic statutes, and associated case law. The objective of this analysis, as supplemented by the empirical data, is to demonstrate how through domestic statutes and other rules of international law, such as the principles of jurisdiction, States may address the gaps in the treaty framework and exercise their criminal or enforcement jurisdiction over DTVs on the high seas.

The human visual system is tasked with transforming variations in light within our environment into a coherent percept, typically described using properties such as luminance and contrast. The experiments described in this dissertation examine how the human visual cortex responds to each of these stimulus properties at the population-level, and explores the degree to which contrast adaptation can alter these response properties. The first set of experiments (Chapter 2) demonstrate how saturating sigmoidal contrast response functions can be captured using human fMRI by leveraging sustained contrast adaptation to reduce the heterogeneity of response profiles across neural populations. The results obtained using this methodology have the potential to rectify the qualitatively different findings reported across visual neuroscience, when comparing electrophysiological and population-based neuroimaging measures. The second set of experiments (Chapter 3) demonstrate how under certain conditions a well-established visuocortical response property, contrast response, can also reflect luminance encoding, challenging the idea that luminance information plays no significant role in supporting visual perception. Specifically, these results show that the mean luminance information of a visual signal persists within visuocortical representations, even after controlling for pupillary dynamics, and potentially reflects an inherent imbalance of excitatory and inhibitory components. The final set of experiments (Chapter 4) examine how the time course of population activity during initial periods of adaptation differs across seemingly slightly different adapter conditions. The degree to which stimulus adapter orientation bias (radial vs. concentric orientation) or stimulus adapter luminance (2409 cd/m2 vs. 757.3 cd/m2) can alter adaptation time course dynamics is examined in detail, as well as investigating the prevalence of any retinotopic bias. In an effort to coalesce the findings across all three chapters, the shape and efficacy of the initial adaptation time course is ultimately compared against the contrast and luminance response function parameters reported in previous chapters. As a whole, the findings reported in this dissertation challenge some common assumptions about how the early human visual cortex adjusts and responds to the environment, provide methodological tools and stimulus design caveats vision neuroscientists will need to consider, and play a significant role in cortical models of vision.

Musical rhythms vary in their complexity. However, how different factors affect the perceived complexity of a rhythm is relatively poorly understood. The primary aim of this thesis was to consider the contribution of three factors to the perceived complexity of a rhythm: (1) musical training, (2) whether or not individuals were asked to tap the beat of the rhythm at a preferred rate before making a complexity rating, and (3) tempo. Of additional interest was the extent to which previously proposed measures of rhythmic complexity can account for variations in perceived rhythmic complexity. In two experiments, participants listened to a set of monotone auditory rhythms and rated their complexity using a 6-point scale: 1-‘Very Simple" to 6-‘Very Complex". In Experiment 1, musically trained and untrained participants were instructed in separate blocks of trials to tap out a regular beat along with the rhythm or to simply listen to the rhythm before making their rating; all rhythms were presented at a fixed tempo (200 ms inter-onset-interval). In Experiment 2, a new sample of musically trained and untrained participants rated the complexity of the most and least complex rhythms in Experiment 1. These rhythms were presented at a range of tempi in both tapping-the-beat and listen-only conditions. Overall, musically untrained participants tended to judge rhythms to be more complex than musically trained participants. In Experiment 1, rhythmic complexity ratings made during the tapping-the-beat condition were significantly higher than ratings made during the listen-only condition; however this was only the case for musically untrained participants. In Experiment 2, rhythmic complexity ratings increased with increasing tempo. Differences in tapping variability as a function of musical training were found, although tempo did not affect participants’ tapping variability in general. Three beat-based measures of rhythmic complexity made reliable and significant predictions of participants’ complexity ratings to varying degrees, and highlight the crucial role of beat perception in the perception of rhythmic complexity.