Relationships between motion after-effects motion sickness susceptibility and "receptivity".

Initially, this thesis constituted an attempt to identify, within the spiral after-effect phenomenon (SAE), the primary source of the wide and reliable individual differences observed in reporting its persistence under constant stimulus conditions. However, as indicated by the title, the pursuit of this aim involved expanding its scope to include stable inter-personal, variation in other spheres, namely labyrinthine after-effects, motion sickness susceptibility, and estimations of sensory magnitude. Experimental evidence, assembled in the body of the thesis, suggested that individual differences in sae persistence, and those observed in these other, apparently disparate activities, emanate from the same underlying source: idiosyncratic differences in the extent to which stimulus. Energy is transduced by the central nervous system. This notion emerged, finally, as the "receptivity" of the title. The existence of a stable dimension of individual differences in sensory function was postulated, the extreme positions of which were labelled: 'receptive' and 'nonreceptive'.'Receptives' were characterised by relatively persistent after-sensations and steep sae/induction period slope values, relatively steep magnitude functions for intensive sensory continua, and a fairly high incidence of reported motion sickness. 'Nonreceptives' showed the opposite characteristics.