ATTENTION
Quaeritur utrum intellectus noster possit multa simul intelligere.
Respondeo dicendum quod intellectus quidem potest simul multa
intelligere per modum unius, non autem multa per modum multorum.—ST.
THOMAS AQUINAS
§19. =The Problem of Attention.=—We have now finished our survey of
the elementary processes of mind; _all our complex experiences may be
analysed into sensations, simple images, and simple feelings_. There
has been no special difficulty, so far, in exchanging the common-sense
point of view for that of scientific psychology. You may not have
realised, positively and intimately, that sensations and simple images
are all meaningless; that we have described them simply as processes,
as experiences going on; you may have been surprised, in view of the
everyday distinction of perception from memory and imagination, to
find that the simple image is only doubtfully to be distinguished from
the sensation; and you may also have been surprised to learn that
the feelings owe their manifold variety of tang and tincture to the
sensations with which a simple feeling, pleasant or unpleasant, is
blended. There is, however, no real difficulty, when once these things
are pointed out, in taking up a scientific standpoint towards the
mental elements.
As soon as we pass to consider _attention_, the case is changed; we
come into definite conflict with popular psychology. =Common sense
regards attention as a voluntary concentration of the mind.= For
instance: I am sitting at my desk, thinking out and writing down the
sentences of this paragraph. As I write, I am subject to all sorts
of sensory stimuli; the temperature of the room, the pressure of my
clothes, the sight of various pieces of furniture, the sounds from
house and street, the scents coming from the room itself or borne
in through the open window, organic excitations of various kinds. I
could easily let my mind wander; I could lapse into reminiscence,
or give the rein to my imagination. Yet I am perfectly well able to
ignore all these distractions, and to concentrate upon my self-imposed
task. Surely, says common sense, surely the whole situation implies a
selective and spontaneous mental activity; I give my attention, of my
own accord, to a certain topic that I have myself chosen; I could, if
I liked, attend to something wholly different. That is _the nature of
attention as it is viewed by common sense_.
Let us see, however, how things look when we try to =describe=
attention, without making any effort to interpret or explain it.
Suppose that, as I sit writing this paragraph, I am called to the
telephone, or am interrupted by the entrance of a friend. My attention
is thus diverted to a new object. What happens? Something happens
that we can only describe as =a shift of the vividness of our mental
processes=. A moment ago, my psychological ideas were vivid, set (as it
were) in the focus of attention, while all other ideas and perceptions
were dim and marginal; now the incoming ideas—my friend’s business
or the subject of the message—drive to the front; they in their turn
become vivid and focal, while the psychological ideas, just lately
central and dominant, fall back, along with the perception of my
sensory surroundings, into the dim background. _Attention, therefore,
if we consider it purely descriptively, hinges not upon mental
activity, but upon the vividness of mental processes_; and the state
of attention may be described as a certain pattern or arrangement of
mental processes; whenever our experience shows the pattern of vivid
centre and dim background, of bright focus and obscure margin, then we
have attention before us.
What, then, is =vividness=? The answer has been given already (p. 66):
vividness is _one of the universal aspects or attributes of sensation_.
Just as all sensations vary in intensity, so do all sensations vary
in vividness. If you want a more positive answer; if you want to know
how precisely vividness ‘feels’ in experience; observe your mental
processes now, as you are puzzling over this book; the difference
between foreground and background, focus and margin,—between the
dominant ideas aroused by what you read, and the obscure perceptions
derived from your surroundings,—will show itself at any rate in the
rough. _Be careful not to confuse vividness with intensity_: when you
are listening intently for a very faint sound, the sound, as it comes,
is the most vivid experience you have, although it is near the lower
limit of intensity; and when you are absorbed in your work, the sound
of the dinner-gong in the hall may be very dim and obscure, although
it is loud enough to be heard all over the house. _Be careful, too, not
to confuse sensory vividness with definiteness of meaning_ (p. 29). A
patch of colour in an oil-painting may strongly attract your attention,
may thus be extremely vivid, and may yet be altogether unintelligible;
and another patch of colour, that you have passed over with ‘half a
glance’ and that remains permanently in the background of experience,
may carry the perfectly definite meaning of a dead soldier. Differences
of vividness are neither differences of strong and weak in sensation,
nor of distinct and indistinct in understanding; they are more like
differences of robust and weakly, or of self-assertive and retiring.
These preliminary remarks are, perhaps, enough to show the nature
of _the problem that attention sets to a scientific psychology_. We
shall be concerned with sensory vividness; we have to find out under
what circumstances a sensation or image becomes vivid, and under what
circumstances it becomes obscure; we have to trace the pattern of
attention in greater detail and with more accuracy; we have to ask how
many sensations may be vivid at the same time, and how long they remain
vivid; and so on. We must keep the common-sense view always in mind,
so that the scientific alternative stands out clearly and distinctly
against it; and we must take scientific account of all that common
sense lays down.
§ 20. =The Development of Attention.=—If we consider a large number
of cases of attention, we find that they fall into three great
groups; and each one of these groups seems to represent a stage in the
development of mind at large, a level of mental evolution. We speak
accordingly of =primary=, of =secondary=, and of =derived primary
attention=. Let us consider them in order.
(1) _Primary attention._—There are certain classes of stimuli
that force attention upon us; they take us by storm, and we can
offer no resistance; when they appear, we must attend, whatever our
preoccupation may be. _Intensive_ stimuli belong to this class: very
loud sounds, very bright lights, strong tastes and smells, severe
pressures, extreme temperatures, intense pains, one and all take
possession of us, dominate us in their own right. A stimulus that is
often _repeated_ is also likely to attract the attention, even if at
first it went unremarked. _Sudden_ stimuli, and sudden changes of
stimulus, have the same effect. So with _movement_: the animal or bird
that crosses the landscape, the melody that rises and falls to a steady
accompaniment, the insect that crawls over our hand as we lie on the
grass, all alike constrain our attention. A _novel_ stimulus has the
same power; it stands alone and unrelated; it startles or arrests us.
Here then is a fairly long list—high intensity, repetition,
suddenness, movement, novelty—of controls to which the human organism
is subject. Let any one of them come into play, and _the corresponding
sensation is made vivid_, shoots to the focus, engrosses us. We may
very quickly shake off the control, and return to the business that
it interrupted; but we cannot altogether escape it. The irresistible
appeal of these various modes of stimulation shows us attention at its
first developmental level.
(2) _Secondary attention._—This casual and forced attention is not,
however, what we ordinarily mean when we speak of ‘giving attention’
to something. We mean rather the sustained attention that we pay to a
task, a lecture, a puzzle; we often mean an attention that goes against
the grain, in which _we_ seem to do the forcing, holding our mind
by main force upon a tedious and uninteresting subject. Is not this
secondary attention very different from primary attention? Let us see.
If you think how many sense-organs man has, all of them open to
manifold stimulation at the same time; and if you think, further, how
many different lines of interest man has, all of them likely to bring
up ideas of memory or ideas of imagination; you will realise that only
very powerful stimuli, those that make an unescapeable biological
appeal to the organism, can compel attention—that is, can thrust
their sensations to the focus—as if in disregard of competition. Such
stimuli are _hors de concours_; all the rest have to face their rivals.
This fact gives us the answer to our question. Secondary attention is
in reality nothing else than _a conflict of nerve-forces, each one of
which, if it were acting alone, would make its sensation or image the
most vivid bit of experience at the moment, but each one of which is
continually checked and thwarted by other forces that are urging their
own sensations or images to the front_. We might say, in brief, that
secondary attention is a conflict of two or more primary attentions;
but we must remember that the actual fighting is done in the nervous
system; we shall say more of that presently. We can observe some part
of this struggle; our mind wanders, our eye is caught by some chance
movement and we lose the thread of our work, we surprise ourselves
thinking of something else, we look at our watch to see how the hour
is going; in a word, the focal processes are instable; now one and now
another perception or idea becomes more vivid than the rest; and the
continual shift of vividness is proof of the conflict of the underlying
nerve-forces.
And the outcome? The outcome is that _the stronger side always wins_.
Not necessarily the stronger side as we observe it; there may be a
more impressive array of ideas on the side that finally gives way; but
the side that has the stronger nerve-forces. It is quite certain that
_nervous forces or tendencies_—think of the force of habit!—_may
guide and direct the course of our thoughts, even though they do not
themselves contribute to thought_, even though (that is) they have no
sensory or imaginal correlates. We shall have more to say of these
guiding tendencies later; meantime let us give an illustration of
their power. Suppose that an observer comes into the laboratory to
take part in a certain experiment, and that the experimenter carefully
explains to him what he is to do. The next day he comes again, and
the explanation is repeated. The next day he comes again; this time
the experimenter says nothing; the experiment just goes on in the
usual way; and so on the following days. Suppose, however, that on the
twentieth day the experimenter says: ‘Are you thinking about what I
told you to do?’ The observer, fearing that he has done wrong, and
feeling very repentant, says: ‘No! to tell the truth I had forgotten
all about it; it had absolutely gone out of my mind; have I been
making mistakes?’ He had not made any mistake; but his reply shows
that a certain tendency, impressed upon his nervous system by the
experimenter’s original explanation, had been effective to direct his
ideas long after the idea of the explanation itself had disappeared.
And what happens here, in a few days’ work in the laboratory, is
happening every day of our lives in the wider experience outside of the
laboratory.
We see, therefore, that there is nothing spontaneous or active about
secondary attention. It is merely primary attention over again, but
_primary attention under difficulties_; it is a direct consequence of
the multiplication of perceptions and ideas, and of the complexity of
the nervous system.
(3) _Derived primary attention._—One of the strongest proofs that
there is no real difference between primary and secondary attention
is that, in course of time, these difficulties vanish. Habit, as we
say, becomes second nature; the thoughts that at first moved haltingly
and with all sorts of interruption gradually become absorbing; work
that was once done with pains and labour grows fascinating, and makes
an unquestioned demand upon us. So the period of struggle ends, and
_we slip back again into primary attention; only this derived form is
controlled, not by the great biological stimuli, but by impressions
that fit in with our acquired interests_. The collector, the inventor,
the expert are roused to keen attention by stimuli which the rest
of the world pass without special notice. Most of the striking
coincidences of life are accounted for by this law; you are thinking
about certain things, and something happens that, because you are
thus thinking and because it is akin to the subject of your thought,
captures your attention. ‘What an amazing coincidence!’ you cry; but if
you had been occupied with some other topic, there would have been no
coincidence. The man in Mr. Kipling’s story who wondered, years after
the event, ‘how in the world he could have written such good stuff as
that’, had written under this same law of attention; for when you are
thoroughly absorbed in a subject, relevant facts and ideas crowd upon
you; the mind stands open to them, while it is fast locked against the
irrelevant; and you surpass yourself. There is, to be sure, another
side to the picture; the enthusiastic adoption of a belief or theory
throws into brilliant relief all the facts that tell in its favour, but
blinds you to the considerations that make against it.
In sum, then, =attention appears in the human mind at three stages
of development=: as primary attention, determined by any stimulus
that is biologically powerful; as secondary attention, during which a
perception or idea dominates the mind in face of opposition; and as
derived primary attention, when this perception or idea has gained
practically undisputed ascendency over its rivals. Looking at life in
the large, we may say that the period of training or education is a
period of secondary attention, and that the following period of mastery
and achievement is a period of derived primary attention. Looking at
experience more in detail, we see that education itself consists,
psychologically, in an alternation of the two attentions; habit is
made the basis of further acquisition, and acquisition, gained with
effort, passes in its turn into habit; the cycle recurs, so long as the
nervous system remains plastic. Secondary attention thus appears as a
stage of transition, of conflict, of waste of nervous energy, though it
appears also as the necessary preliminary to a stage of real knowledge.
Meanwhile and all the while there is no escape from interruption by the
original primary attention; but the interruptions grow less and less
disturbing as civilisation proceeds.
§ 21. =The Nature of Attention.=—Our next task, in the words of p. 93,
is to _trace the pattern of attention_, to describe as accurately as
possible the arrangement of our vivid and obscure sensations. Notice
that, in popular parlance, attention covers only the vivid processes of
the moment; psychologically, however, the term includes both the vivid
and the obscure, those that we are ‘distracted from’ as well as those
that we are ‘attending to,’ This being understood, we may attempt a
description.
It seems that, _in most cases, the state of attention is_ =twofold=
_and only twofold_. There is a cluster of sensations at the centre, all
of approximately the same vividness, and there is a mass of sensations
in the background, all of approximately the same obscurity. Suppose
that you are looking at one of the puzzle-pictures that are published
in certain magazines,—trying to find a face outlined in the branches
of a tree. At first, the whole picture is vivid, and the rest of your
experience is obscure. Suddenly you find what you are seeking; and
what happens? In all likelihood, the picture drops with a jerk into
the general dimness of the background, while the face that you have
discovered stands out by itself in all imaginable vividness; you forget
the picture, and see nothing but the face. The state of attention,
then, in this its usual form, may be represented by two concentric
circles; a small inner circle stands for the focus of attention, a
large outer circle circumscribes its margin. There is experimental
evidence that, when our sensations are thus arranged, their vividness
and obscurity are, as the arithmetics say, inversely proportional; _the
more vivid the central processes, the more obscure are the marginal_;
or, in untechnical language, the more we are concentrated upon any one
thing, the less liable are we to distraction by other things. This
twofold arrangement seems to be, for most of us, the regular pattern
of attention; but certain observations in the laboratory, which are
borne out by statements in various text-books of psychology, make it
practically certain that _there is another, less frequent and more
complicated type of arrangement_. Here the picture does not drop clear
down into the background, when the face is found, but remains poised
somewhere between focal vividness and marginal obscurity; so that three
degrees of vividness—sometimes even four have been reported—may be
distinguished in one and the same state of attention. In such cases,
attention must be represented by three or four concentric circles; the
inner and the outer still show the focus and margin of the total state;
the others indicate that there are sensations present whose vividness
lies somewhere between those extremes. Whether the focal processes
suffer from the rivalry of the moderately vivid sensations; whether,
that is, attention in its threefold or fourfold pattern is necessarily,
even at the best, of a lower degree than the best attention of the
twofold kind, we do not know.
Our description of attention is so far complete; but there are two
further questions that naturally occur. Do we not attend to what
‘interests’ us? In that case, however, attention must imply feeling.
And is not sustained attention tiring? In that case, attention would
seem to imply muscular sensation. These are undoubtedly points to
be considered, and we must try to get at the facts. _Are feeling
and kinæsthesis necessary in attention_, or are they merely chance
accompaniments of the attentive state?
It all depends upon the stage of development at which attention
appears. At first, in =primary attention=, the organism _perceived_
the strong or sudden or novel or moving thing, as sight or sound or
touch, and also _felt_ it, as disturbing or startling or surprising;
attention implied a sense-feeling. At the same time, the organism _took
up an attitude_ to the stimulus, in the literal sense; faced it, as
peering and listening and frightened animals face such stimuli to-day.
At this stage, then, _the shift of vividness is always accompanied
both by feeling and by sensations_,—sensations due to internal bodily
changes and to muscular attitude. Then comes =secondary attention=,
with its conflict between various claimants for the inner circle of
attention; and the conflicting stimuli will, naturally, arouse a medley
of sense-feelings and set up a struggle of more or less incompatible
motor attitudes. In civilised man, the scene of the conflict has been
largely transferred from perception to idea; but _the effort that we
make when we apply ourselves to a task, the difficulty that we have
in settling down, the fatigue that results from sustained work upon
a difficult theme_, all these things are reminders of the general
uneasiness and restlessness that characterise secondary attention
at the perceptive level. Only when we come to =derived primary
attention= do feeling and kinæsthesis cease to be necessary factors
in the attentive state. What we call mechanical, habitual, expert,
professional attention means extremely vivid experience; but it _need
not involve either feeling or kinæsthetic sensation_. Attention is no
longer turbid with organic processes; the stream of mind has cleared
itself. Common sense would say, and rightly, that a cool and critical
poise has replaced the older animal excitement, and would emphasize the
value of this change. We do not question the value; but we are at the
end of our psychological enquiry when we have shown what the change in
experience actually is, and how it is brought about.
But are we at the end? Should we not say something about =inattention=,
which in everyday life we take to be the opposite of attention? have
we not still to describe the inattentive state? No: _in the normal
waking life there is, in strictness, no such thing as inattention_. We
give that name to an attention which is directed upon what we regard
as an improper object. The inattentive person is merely attending to
something else; the pattern remains the same. It is possible that, in
certain abnormal cases, all mental processes alike run their course in
relative obscurity; but even here we are not dealing with inattention;
there is some weakness or obstruction of nerve-forces, which prevents
sensations from reaching their full normal vividness.
§ 22. =The Experimental Study of Attention.=—The question of the
=range= of attention,—how many sensations or images may occupy the
focus at the same time,—was canvassed in the Middle Ages: witness our
quotation from St. Thomas. The first appeal to experiment seems to have
been made, in the late thirties of the past century, by the Scottish
philosopher Sir Wm. Hamilton. “You can easily make the experiment for
yourselves,” Hamilton tells his students, “but you must beware of
grouping the objects into classes. If you throw a handful of marbles on
the floor, you will find it difficult to view at once more than six, or
seven at most, without confusion; but if you group them into twos, or
threes, or fives, you can comprehend as many groups as you can units.”
The experiment is not very rigorous; but more accurate work on the
subject shows that Hamilton was not far wrong. _If a field of simple
visual stimuli is shown for a brief time, the practised observer is in
fact able to grasp six of them_; and if familiar groups are substituted
for the separate stimuli (short words for letters, or playing-card
fives for single dots), the range of visual attention remains the same.
_In this case the stimuli are presented together in space; they may
also be presented in time._ If you listen to a metronome beating,
say, 15 in the minute, you will be able with practice to hold _six
successive strokes_ in the focus of attention, but not more; if you
try to group the seventh stroke with the preceding six you become
confused; the series breaks, and cannot be welded together again. As
the speed of the metronome is increased, the beats fall of themselves
into groups of twos and threes; and you can still grasp and hold six
of these rhythmical impressions. When the speed has reached some 200
in the minute, the rhythmical grouping becomes more complicated; as
many as eight single beats may be bound together in a rhythmical unit;
and the attention is adequate, again after practice, to five of these
complex groups; the focus comprises no less than forty separate strokes
of the pendulum. _This result, we may note, agrees very well with the
canons of musical and poetic composition._ The musical phrase never
contains more than six measures, and the poetical line or verse never
contains more than six feet; a seven-measured phrase or a seven-footed
line falls to pieces, ceases to be unitary. The rhythmical wholes of a
higher order, the period in music and the stanza or strophe in poetry,
never contain more than five phrases or verses; as a rule, neither
contains more than four.
So much for range; we turn to consider =duration=; how long can a
sensation maintain itself at the focus? how long can we attend to a
single simple impression? The early experiments on this question were
most ingenious. The observer was required to look steadily at a little
disc of very light grey, shown against a white background, or to listen
intently to the very faint sound of a stream of fine sand; and the
theory was that, since these stimuli were barely distinguishable at
the outset, any lapse of attention, any decline in the vividness of the
sensations, would blot them out altogether; they would disappear. The
sensations did disappear, after a few seconds; and then, after another
few seconds, came back; and so the conclusion was drawn that attention
fluctuates, that we can attend to a single simple impression only for
a few seconds at a time. No doubt attention fluctuates; but these
experiments, unfortunately, are not to the point; for the disappearance
and reappearance of the sensations can be accounted for by changes in
the sense-organ, by adaptation, by twitching of the eyes, and so on.
Other experiments have therefore been suggested. If we have recourse
to smell and touch, we find that the course of adaptation to an odour,
or to the pressure of a small weight laid upon the skin, may be
followed attentively, without noticeable fluctuation, for two or three
minutes; and the observers report that they could have kept up their
attention still longer. Again, however, objection may be raised; for
as adaptation advances, the sensation grows fainter and fainter; and
the attention is thus continually spurred to hold it; the observer is
not attending to an unchanging process, but is sharpening his attention
to something that becomes more and more difficult to fix. Here we are,
for the present, at a standstill. _There is no doubt that attention
fluctuates_; the bare fact is plain enough in our everyday experience;
but we have no experimental ground for a more definite statement.
Experiments have also been made to determine the =bodily changes= which
occur in the state of secondary attention (p. 102). It is found that
the volume of the brain increases, while the volume of the arm (save in
experiments in which tactual stimuli are employed) decreases. Breathing
becomes shallower; and expiration becomes relatively longer as compared
with inspiration, so that the quotient _I_: _E_, time of inspiration
divided by time of expiration, becomes less. There are changes in the
rate of pulse; but they seem to differ according as the attention is
‘sensory’ or ‘intellectual,’—according, that is, as the focal process
is a sensation or something more complicated, a perception or idea:
in sensory attention the pulse beats more slowly, in intellectual
attention more quickly, than its normal rate. It is natural that the
blood, in attention, should be drawn from the members to the brain; it
is natural, too, that this rule should be broken when a limb is itself
the ‘object’ of attention; and we all know that there is a tendency,
when we are attentive, to hold the breath; so that the changes of
volume and breathing are not surprising. Nothing more can be said at
present of the changes in rate of pulse.
§ 23. =The Nervous Correlate of Attention.=—It remains to say a word
about the nature of the nerve-forces (§ 20) which underlie attention.
Physiologists tell us that one nervous process may influence another
in two opposite ways: by helping and by hindering, or, in technical
terms, by =reinforcement= and =inhibition=. Let us take an elementary
example of what they mean. Suppose that a frog has been reduced, by
the removal of its cerebral hemispheres, to a mere nerve-and-muscle
machine; it lives, but it cannot sense or feel, and it does not move
‘of its own accord.’ If, now, a weak pressure is applied to the frog’s
hind foot, there is no visible response; the limb remains passive. But
if at the same moment a light is flashed into the eye, the leg-muscles
may be thrown into strong contraction. Here we must suppose that the
two nervous processes, from skin and eye, have in some way helped
each other; there is nervous reinforcement. If, again, a pressure is
applied to a certain part of the frog’s body, the animal croaks. If a
strong pressure is applied to another part of the body, it replies by a
contraction of the muscles. If, however, the two pressures are applied
together, the frog does not both croak and move; it does neither; there
is no response to the stimuli. Here, therefore, we must suppose that
the two nervous processes interfere with each other; there is nervous
inhibition.
It seems plain that these two influences are at work among the nervous
processes correlated with attention. _The vivid sensations at the
focus are sensations whose corresponding nervous processes have been
reinforced, and the dim sensations of the background are sensations
whose corresponding nervous processes have been inhibited._ No doubt,
the distribution of these forces, in a given instance, is really a
matter of _degree_; the reinforced nervous process receives more
reinforcement than inhibition, and conversely. No doubt, also, the
_removal_ of an existing inhibition may produce the same effect as the
addition of a reinforcement, and conversely. We are still too much in
the dark as regards the intimate character of the nerve-forces, we
know too little of their actual course as nervous function in nervous
structure, to be able properly to distinguish cases. There is evidence
that _inhibition_ may be extraordinarily effective: thus the late
Dr. W. B. Carpenter relates that he “has frequently begun a lecture,
whilst suffering neuralgic pain so severe as to make him apprehend
that he would find it impossible to proceed; yet no sooner has he,
by a determined effort, fairly launched himself into the stream of
thought, than he has found himself continuously borne along without the
least distraction, until the end has come, and the attention has been
released; when the pain has recurred with a force that has overmastered
all resistance, making him wonder how he could ever have ceased to feel
it.” _Reinforcement_ also may be carried to a high degree: how else
could the listener follow the part assigned to some special group of
instruments in the orchestra, while he still hears the full harmony?
and how, still more, could the conductor single out the particular
violin-player, who has mistaken a note, from the group of sixteen who
are all playing precisely the same part?
We may suppose, therefore, that _one and the same pattern of attention
is due to very varied combinations of reinforcing and inhibiting
nerve-forces_. How then shall we account for the fact that, in any
given instance, vividness and obscurity are inversely proportional
(p. 100)? The reason seems to be—though we could not have learned
it from the experiments on the frog—that a reinforcement and a
corresponding inhibition always go hand in hand; you cannot reinforce
one process without at the same time inhibiting others, and you
cannot inhibit without reinforcing. _The nerve-forces are thus
interlinked or, as we might say, double-acting._ We are struck by
the inhibition in Carpenter’s case; but the case has another side;
for the more successful the inhibition of the neuralgia, the better
was the lecture delivered. So we are struck by the reinforcement in
the case of the conductor; but that, too, has another side; for the
keener his attention to the music, the more oblivious is he of his
other surroundings. We shall come back later to this notion of the
interlinking of the nerve-forces, and shall indicate the evidence upon
which it rests.
In summary, we may repeat our general statement that _vividness
is paralleled by nervous reinforcement, and obscurity by nervous
inhibition_. Only we must realise that the processes actually going on
in the brain may be very complicated; many separate forces may be at
work behind the single mental pattern, and their action may be brought
about in different ways; and we must remember also that every one of
these separate forces is double-faced, reinforcing and inhibiting at
the same time.
Questions and Exercises
(1) “So numerous and varied are the ramifications of attention, that
we find it defined by competent authorities as a state of muscular
contraction and adaptation, as a pure mental activity, as an emotion
or feeling, and as a change in the clearness of ideas. Each of the
definitions can be justified from the facts, if we put the chief
emphasis now upon one phase and now upon another of its varied
expressions” (W. B. Pillsbury, Attention, 1908, 1). Discuss this
passage.
(2) Give instances, from your own experience, of the three levels of
attention. Trace the development (still from your own experience) of
derived primary from secondary attention.
(3) Describe carefully the attitudes (_a_) of the scout (secondary
visual attention) and (_b_) of the eavesdropper (secondary auditory
attention). How do you account for their difference?
(4) A child that has fallen and hurt itself stops crying if you offer
it a toy; a soldier who in the heat of battle has received a serious
wound may know nothing of it, and may go on fighting till he drops from
exhaustion; many a martyr has suffered at the stake with calm serenity.
How far are these cases explicable by the laws of attention?
(5) Criticise Sir Wm. Hamilton’s experiment. Do not be satisfied till
you have found several reasons for distrusting its result.
(6) Do the lower animals ever give evidence of derived primary
attention?
(7) You can follow the movement of a single instrument in the orchestra
better, when it has been playing a solo before, than when the whole
group of instruments begin together. Why is this? Give other instances
of the same law.
(8) It has been proposed to measure the degree of attention by
measuring the degree of effort which accompanies it. What have you to
say to the proposal?
(9) How could you tell, by outward observation, whether a child is
attentive or inattentive? and whether it is adequate to its task or
is in difficulties? Do not just list the symptoms; make your answer
psychological.
(10) Determine the range of attention (_a_) by help of an ordinary
metronome, set at various rates. You must not count the beats, since
every count would mean a separate attention. Determine the range also
(_b_) by help of the letter-diagram and cardboard screen figured by W.
Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology, 1912, 19. Notice the remark (p.
23) that the experimenter must practise covering and uncovering the
diagram.
(11) Paint or paste a small disc of light grey on a white cardboard
ground. Move so far away that the spot is only just distinguishable.
Call out Gone! and Back! as it disappears and reappears, and have the
times noted on the seconds-dial of a watch. Explain the fluctuation, in
your own words, as due to adaptation and eye-movement. Can you devise
a simple method of showing (by means of the negative after-image) that
unnoticed eye-movements really occur?
(12) St. Thomas asks whether the mind can grasp more than one thing at
a time; and replies that it can, if the various things are regarded
as making up a single whole, but that it cannot, if they are regarded
in their variety and particularity. Can you put all this into
psychological language? And can you find any difference between St.
Thomas’ question and our own question as to the range of attention?
References
Sir W. Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics, i., 1859, 254; W. B.
Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, 1888, ch. iii.; W. James,
Principles of Psychology, i., 1890, ch. xi.; W. Wundt, Lectures on
Human and Animal Psychology, 1896, Lect. xvii.; Outlines of Psychology,
1907, § 15; W. B. Pillsbury, Attention, 1908; E. B. Titchener, Lectures
on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention, 1908, Lects.
v.-viii.; Text-book of Psychology, 1910, 265 ff.