This is a detailed summary for the elective Attention: Theory & Practice based on Chapter 1 until Chapter 11 of the book Johnson, A. & Proctor, R.W. (2004). Attention: Theory and practice. Thousands Oaks, California: Sage Publications
The summary contains the diagrams and images from the book. You ...
Chapter 1- Historical Overview of Research on Attention
The study of attention is concerned with how people are able to coordinate perception and
action to achieve goals
First research: put the study of attention in experimental psychology
1890 - The Psychology of Attention by Ribot
1908/1973:
- Psychology of Feeling and Attention by Titchener: discovery of attention as one of the 3
major achievements of experimental psychology to that point
- Pillsbury - Attention: also emphasizes the importance of attention
History of research on attention in 5 periods:
1) Philosophic work preceding the founding of the field of psychology
2) The period from the founding of psychology until 1909
3) The period from 1910 until 1949, during which behaviorism flourished and interest in
attention waned to some extent
4) The resurgence of widespread interest in attention during the period of the cognitive
revolution from 1950 to 1974
5) Contemporary research dating from 1975 to the present
The philosophical period
The topic of attention was originally discussed by philosophers
Issues concerned: the role of attention in conscious awareness and thought, whether
attention was directed voluntarily or involuntarily towards objects and events
Characterization of attention (by each philosopher): individual’s larger metaphysical view of
the nature of things and how we come to know the world
Watson refers to Vives as the father of modern psychology
Vives:
Among the first to recognize the importance of empirical investigation
De Anima et Vita - 1538
Known for his view on memory: attention played a sigh. Role.
- The more closely one attends to stimuli the better they’ll be retained
- Learning consists of the formation of associations, and retrieval from memory occurs
through automatic activation of associated ideas or through intentional effortful
search
Malebranche:
(Berlyne attributes the first extended treatment of attention to him)
The Search After Truth: we have access to ideas, or mental representations of the external
world, but not direct access to the world itself
- Attention necessary to prevent ideas from becoming confused and to make them
clear
- Understanding is no different than simple perception but bc it often happens that the
understanding has only confused and imperfect perceptions of things → cause of our
errors
- The mind doesn’t pay equal attention to everything it perceives
Leibniz:
Introduced Apperception: an act that is necessary for an individual to become conscious of a
perceptual event
, - Events can be perceived unconsciously but will not enter conscious awareness
without apperception
- A reflexive view of attention: in which attention is directed automatically to events and
ideas that demand it BUT attention has a voluntary and directed aspect
Herbart:
- Agreed with Leibniz - an event had to be perceived to enter conscious awareness
- BUT stresses that apperception involved relating newly perceived ideas to ones
already contained in the mind
- All new perceptual experience occurs in relation to prior perceptions
Popular view of first part of 19th century: people are incapable of attending to more than one
thing at once
- Hamilton argued that the span of attention is more than one object - measuring its
size by throwing marbles on the floor and determining how many of them could be
apprehended at once
The period from 1860 to 1909
The philosophical analysis of attention led to some predictions that could be tested
experimentally
In mid 1800s - psychophysical methods developed that allowed measurement of the relation
between physical stimulus properties and the psychological perceptions of them
Speed of mental processes
Wilhelm Wundt- credited with establishing the first laboratory devoted to psychological
research - 1879 - responsible for introducing the study of attention to the field
As laboratory assistant (Heidelberg) - became interested in the issue of the astronomers’
personal equation: systematic individual differences between astronomers in their measures
of the time for the transit of stars
- Astronomers in the late 18th century. To early 19th century measured time by
determining when the stars and planets crossed the meridian
- Measured with special telescope
- Generally accepted method that had advantages BUT individual differences in
the judgment of when the stars crossed each of the wires resulted in different
readings from one astronomer to another
→ In an attempt to compensate for differences in timing among the astronomers, a personal
equation was developed in which a constant “correction” was made in order to equate their
readings.
Around 1860 - Wundt set up an apparatus to simulate this situation
Insight of Blumenthal led Wundt to emphasize the voluntary control of attention
De Jagger’s (1865/1970) dissertation provided the first account of the experiments
conducted in Donders’s lab.
- experiments described in the dissertation focused on measuring the time required to
identify a stimulus and to select a motor response.
- De jagger interpreted reaction time as the duration of the central processes involving
stimulus discrimination and response initiation
Donders:
Formalized the method used by De Jagger: subtractive method: e mphasizing specifically
that the time for a particular process could be estimated by adding that process to a task and
taking the difference in RT between the 2 tasks
, Distinguished between 3 types of reactions:
A: the symbol reaction
B: Choice reaction
C: go or no-go reaction, respond to one stimulus but not another
The difference between the c- and a-reactions was presumed to reflect the time for stimulus
identification, and the difference between the b- and c-reactions was considered to be the
time for “expression of the will”
Reaction-time research in general, and the study of action selection in particular, continued
to flourish throughout the remainder of the 19th century
- Wundt criticized Donders for using the c-reaction as a measure of stimulus
identification, reasoning that subjects must distinguish between whether to respond
or not and suggested: d-reaction: assessed by presenting subjects with the same
stimulus and having them make the same response every time as in the a-reaction
with the difference being that they’re instructed not to respond until they have
identified the stimulus
Effects of Attention
The relation between attention and perception was one of the first topics to be studied in
experimental psychology
End of 19th cent: Von Helmholtz: argued that attention is essential for visual perception
Found that:
- Attention could be directed in advance of the stimulus presentation to a particular
region of the page even though the eyes were kept fixed at a central point
- Attention limited
Wundt:
- Attention was an inner activity that caused ideas to be present to differing degrees in
consciousness
- Distinguished between perception: the entry into the field of attention & apperception:
responsible for entry into the inner focus
- Focus of attention could narrow or widen a view that has also enjoyed popularity in
recent years
Wundt (1907a) said, “Attention contains three essential constituents: an increased clearness
of ideas; muscle sensations, which generally belong to the same modal- ity as the ideas; and
feelings, which accompany and precede the ideational change”
Voluntarism: d escribe his school of psychology: emphasized volition or the study of
conscious decision and choice
- Psychological concepts can be understood only in terms of their goals or
consequences & apperception and attention are processes of active synthesis
Lotze:
- Did not accept the view that attention is simply a more intense illumination of the
content
Instead: conscious attention occurs to varying degrees with lower processes such as a
simple sensory experience not always accompanied by higher processes involving
comparison of relations between the simple sensations or them and previous experiences
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