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This thesis examines how legal processes in the administration of Personal Independence Payment (PIP) are implicated in the construction of disabled identities and the elicitation of performances of disabled identities. To answer this, I highlight how invisible disabilities and fluctuating conditions make up the majority of disabilities, despite wider understandings assuming that disability is physical, stable, and visible. By examining the disparity between understandings of disability and the lived reality, I show how legal processes are actively involved in shifting the borders of disability. In order to demonstrate how disabled identities are created within the assessment and tribunal processes, I have developed a material-discursive framework that I call amplification. I blend aspects of new materialism and performativity to build a tool to examine the spaces generated by the PIP processes. I have used amplification to examine existing textual sources and new qualitative data on PIP assessments and appeals, to create a more detailed picture of how disabled identities are created and changed by the UK welfare state. The findings of this thesis show that there are different material-discursive factors that contribute to the constitution of disabled identities, resulting in those identities being situationally contingent and changing over time. Amplification also incorporates the significant role that conscious performances play in the development of disabled identities. Using amplification to examine PIP demonstrates that there is a subversive potential within these processes, to remake disability in a more inclusive way. By highlighting that legal processes are active agents in the production (and change) of disabled identities, I argue that an acknowledgement of the diversity of disability is essential for ensuring that effective decision-making is deployed at all stages and to effectively support disabled people to participate in legal processes when they are required to contest their PIP award.

Despite continued interest in the capacity limitations of Visual Short-Term Memory (VSTM), there is uncertainty as to how these limited resources are distributed: among a limited number of high resolution slots or flexibly according to task demands. This thesis extends current knowledge by exploring how top-down and perceptual mechanisms affect VSTM capacity. The General Introduction describes the current understanding and investigation of capacity limits. This appraisal extends into Chapter 2, which focuses on the specific behavioural, psychometric, and electrophysiological approaches taken in this thesis to estimate effects on the precision and probability of recall of VSTM representations. Most experiments used a change-detection task that parametrically varied the precision of the VSTM representations required for accurate responses. Chapter 3 presents an event-related potential (ERP) study involving a pre-cue, which enabled a shift of spatial attention in anticipation of an upcoming memory array. ERP signatures of anticipatory spatial attention predicted behavioural cueing benefits. As a complement, the study in Chapter 4 involved orienting attention to items already in VSTM. Results from both chapters suggest that attention affects the probability of recall rather than the precision of representations. Chapter 5 describes four experiments exploring the ability to trade the number versus precision of representations in VSTM according to task goals. No flexibility was found in setting this trade-off, suggesting that the balance between number and precision is mainly determined by stimulus driven factors. Experiments in Chapter 6 investigate whether and how competitive dynamics that characterise perceptual processing continue to influence VSTM representations. Competition among item features that were orthogonal to the task relevant features continued to influence performance. Perceptual differences between the conditions cannot account for this effect. Competitive effects were consistent across spatial and non-spatial dimensions. The General Discussion synthesises all results and highlights opportunities for future research.

Treatment strategies for advanced malignancy remain limited in their success, despite major advances in the understanding of cancer aetiology and molecular biology. The incidence of many cancers, including melanoma, continues to rise, with a huge demand for therapies even if treatment goals are purely cytostatic. One particular therapeutic strategy is the metronomic (continuous and low) dosing of conventional chemotherapy. There is evidence to suggest that tumour vasculature is the main target of this dosing schedule resulting in an overall 'non specific' anti-angiogenic effect. It is now being studied in clinical trials alone and in combination with specific anti- angiogenic agents. This thesis had two main aims: firstly to investigate the additive or synergistic anti- endothelial effects of a number of conventional cytotoxic agents (Temozolomide, Paclitaxel, Vinorelbine, Etoposide, Carboplatin) in vitro given in a metronomic schedule in combination with a specific anti-angiogenic compound (Sorafenib) and a non-specific sompound (Combretastatin). The anti-proliferative, cytotoxic activities of the metronomic combinatorial schedules were assessed on microvascular endothelial cells and cancer cells usmg an MTT proliferation assay. Results confirmed significant (p