Concept
Attention
Overview
behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether deemed subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Attention is discussed.
Strange to say, so patent a fact as the perpetual presence of selective attention has received hardly any notice from psychologists of the English empiricist school. The Germans have explicitly treated of it, either as a faculty or as a resultant, but in the pages of such writers as Locke, Hume, Hartley, the Mills, and Spencer the word hardly occurs, or if it does so, it is parenthetically and as if by…
William James, The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1
a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; names the idea; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Whoever treats of interest inevitably treats of attention, for to say that an object is interesting is only another way of saying that it excites attention. But in addition to the attention which any object already interesting or just becoming interesting claims--passive attention or spontaneous attention, we may call it--there is a more deliberate attention,--voluntary attention or attention with effort, as it is…
William James, Talks To Teachers On Psychology
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; author linked in the graph; opens on it
They can by practice be separated, and the attention can be directed to a point in indirect vision, i.e. a point lying to this or to that side of the line of vision. From this we see that clear perception in the psychological sense and clear vision in the physiological sense do not necessarily coincide.
Wilhelm Max Wundt, An Introduction to Psychology Translated from the Second German Edition
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; author linked in the graph; opens on it
The problem is one’s own; hence also the impetus, the stimulus to attention, is one’s own; hence also the training secured is one’s own—it is discipline, or gain in power of control; that is, a _habit_ of considering problems.
John Dewey, The school and society
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
Yet we see, on the contrary, that many acts are most successfully carried out when they are not the objects of particularly concentrated attention, and that the mistakes occur just at the point where one is most anxious to be accurate--where a distraction of the necessary attention is therefore surely least permissible. One could then say that this is the effect of the "excitement," but we do not understand why the…
Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
names the idea; states what it is
Philosophers who discussed Attention
Related ideas
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Nicolas Malebranche
- Intentionality
- Johann Friedrich Herbart
- Sir William Hamilton, 9th Baronet
- William Stanley Jevons
- Cognitive revolution
- Functional magnetic resonance imaging
- Sense
- Indigenous peoples of the Americas
- Brain injury
- Working memory
- Wilhelm Wundt
- Anterior cingulate cortex
- Awareness
- Hermann von Helmholtz
- Behaviorism
- Consciousness
- The Principles of Psychology
- Cognitive psychology
- Definition
- William James
- John B. Watson
- Juan Luis Vives
Place in the tradition
Part of Consciousness.