Behavior

Abstract

By the second decade of the twentieth century, the fixation on attention that had preoccupied the nineteenth-century human sciences had all but disappeared. There was a precipitous decline in research and publication that took up the problem as a stand-alone object of philosophical, psychological, and scientific inquiry, and a concomitant reorientation of the remaining interest in attention toward the more empiricist realm of the applied sciences. The reasons for this alteration were numerous and elusive, but by 1910 the fields of philosophy, neurophysiology, psychophysics, physiological psychology, and sociology, all of which had yielded voluminous studies on the topic, fell comparatively silent as they shifted in their orientation and turned to meet the demands of early twentieth-century modernity. Generally speaking, nineteenth-century theories of attention had been born from an uneasy confrontation between the autonomous, transcendental consciousness of the Enlightenment and modern psychophysiology. The principal investigators into the subject all grappled with this opposition in similar ways. For figures like John Dewey, Gustav Fechner, Herman von Helmholtz, William James, G. E. Müller, Walter Pilsbury, Théodule Ribot, Edward Titchener, and many others, attention took shape somewhere in the meeting place between the inalienable quality of the conscious mind and the automated systems of the sensory motor cortex.