Attention in Early Scientific Psychology

Abstract

Abstract Attention is a salient feature of human mentality, at least in its conscious manifestations. Yet attention became a central topic in psychology only recently by comparison with such areas as sensory perception, imagination, or memory. Descriptions of the chief characteristics of attention were built up from classical antiquity to the seventeenth century. But attention first became a chapter heading in standard psychology textbooks during the 1730s. This chronology has an air of paradox about it because it dates the entrance of attention into psychology prior to the commonly accepted dates for the origin of psychology itself. The origin of natural scientific psychology is now typically dated to 1879, or to sometime in the two preceding decades. This dating reflects a certain perspective on “natural scientific psychology” that equates it with the experimental psychology of Wundt and Titchener. If one takes a broader perspective, permit ting the definitions of the terms “natural science” and “psychology” to vary across the historical past (according to their interpretation by past thinkers), then natural scientific psychology has a much longer history than is suggested by Ebbinghaus’ s celebrated phrase contrasting a “short history” with a “long past” (1908, p. 1).

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