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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Attention | 1/5 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T11:04:13.138266+00:00 | kb-cron |
Attention is the concentration of awareness directed at some task or phenomenon while mostly excluding others. Across disciplines, the nature of this directedness is conceptualized in different ways. In cognitive psychology, attention is often described as the allocation of limited cognitive processing resources to a subset of information, thoughts, or tasks. In neuropsychology, attention is understood as a set of mechanisms by which sensory cues and internal goals modulate neuronal tuning and orient behavioral and cognitive processes. Attention is not a unitary phenomenon but an umbrella term for multiple related processes, including selective attention (prioritizing some stimuli over others), sustained attention (maintaining focus), divided attention (sharing resources across tasks), and orienting (shifting focus in space or time). These processes are supported by distributed neural networks in frontal, parietal, and subcortical regions and are closely linked to working memory, executive functions, and consciousness. Patterns of attention also vary across cultures, especially in how individuals attend to context versus focal objects and how children are guided to manage attention in everyday activities.
== History ==
=== 16th century === John B. Watson called Juan Luis Vives the father of modern psychology. In his book De Anima et Vita, Vives argued that the more closely one attends to stimuli, the better they are retained in memory.
=== 17th century === Daniel E. Berlyne credited the first extended treatment of attention to Nicolas Malebranche, for whom attention is necessary "to keep our perceptions from being confused and imperfect". Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz introduced the concept of apperception, referring to "the process by which new experience is assimilated to and transformed by the residuum of past experience of an individual to form a new whole". Apperception is required for a perceived event to become a conscious event. Leibniz emphasized a reflexive, involuntary view of attention (exogenous orienting), while also recognizing voluntary, directed attention (endogenous orienting). Johann Friedrich Herbart agreed with Leibniz's view of apperception but emphasized that new experiences must be tied to those already existing in the mind. Herbart was also among the first to stress the importance of applying mathematical modeling to the study of psychology.
=== 19th century === In the early 19th century, some theorists argued that people could not attend to more than one stimulus at a time. Later, William Hamilton likened attentional capacity to holding marbles: only a limited number can be held at once before they spill over. He proposed that more than one stimulus can be attended simultaneously. William Stanley Jevons expanded this view, suggesting that people can attend to up to four items at a time. Wilhelm Wundt introduced the systematic study of attention into psychology. He examined mental processing speed by analogy with differences in astronomical measurements: astronomers differed in the times they recorded for star transits, leading to the idea of a personal equation. Wundt argued that such differences reflect the time required to shift voluntary attention from one stimulus to another, rather than mere "observation error". Franciscus Donders used mental chronometry to study attention, making it a major topic of investigation. Donders and his students measured the time required to identify a stimulus and select a response, developing the subtractive method to estimate the duration of specific mental processes. He distinguished between simple, choice, and go/no-go reaction times. Hermann von Helmholtz also contributed to attention research, showing that it is possible to focus on one stimulus while still perceiving others. For example, one can fixate on the letter "u" in the word "house" while still perceiving "h", "o", "s", and "e". A major debate of this period concerned whether it was possible to attend to two things at once (split attention). William James, in The Principles of Psychology, provided an influential definition:
Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German. James distinguished between sensorial attention (to physically present stimuli) and intellectual attention (to imagined or remembered objects). He also differentiated immediate from derived attention and identified five major effects of attention: it influences perception, conception, discrimination, memory, and reaction time.
=== 20th century ===
==== 1910–1949 ==== During the first half of the 20th century, explicit research on attention declined as behaviorism became dominant, leading some, such as Ulric Neisser, to claim that “there was no research on attention”. Nonetheless, important work was conducted. In 1927, A. T. Jersild published research on "mental set and shift," arguing that “the fact of mental set is primary in all conscious activity”. He showed that it took longer to complete a mixed list (e.g., animals, books, car models, fruits) than a pure list (e.g., only animals), highlighting costs of task switching. In 1931, C. W. Telford identified the psychological refractory period, the delay in responding to a second stimulus when it closely follows a first, reflecting a refractory phase in the nervous system. In 1935, John Ridley Stroop developed what became known as the Stroop effect, demonstrating that task-irrelevant stimulus information (such as word meaning) can strongly interfere with performance.
==== 1950–1999 ==== In the 1950s, attention research was revitalized as psychology underwent the "cognitive revolution", shifting away from strict positivism and behaviorism to include unobservable mental processes as legitimate objects of study.