Ascension is a field of fundamental study for psychology and neuroscience.
The attention is an essential psychological mechanism for perception,
cognition and action, influencing any decision that the human being must
make. Since its inception, scientific psychology has put a lot of interest
in the phenomenon of attention. The... In 1908, two classic texts were
published, by Tichner and Pillsbury. All of them provided solid foundations
for the study of attention in the field of psychology. They wrote in their
text that the discovery of attention was one of the greatest achievements
of experimental psychology to this day. From Pillsbury's text, a similar
idea is taken up about the importance of the study of attention. We can
segment this topic... The history of attention... The history of research
on attention in five broad periods... The philosophical, which was prior to
the establishment of psychology as a science. From the foundation of
psychology until 1909, second place. Then, from 1910 until 1949, an era
that coincided with the rise of conductive dominion. With an apparent
decrease in the works on attention. Then, in the fourth place... from 1950
to 1974, which coincides with the cognitive revolution, a period in which
interest for attention resurfaces. And in fifth place, the fifth period is
contemporary research, from 1975 to today. Let's start with the
philosophical period. There are some relevant philosophers, such as the
Spanish Luis Vives, who has privilege of being considered by Watson himself
as the father of modern psychology. Vives was one of the first humanists to
recognize the importance of empirical research. This Spanish man is known
for his observations on the relationship between attention and memory. We
also have Malebranche, the first philosopher who dealt with the subject of
attention. He affirmed that we have access to knowledge, to the ideas and
representations of the outside world, but not to the world itself.
Malebranche said that attention is necessary to maintain clarity and
prevent ideas from confusing each other. Another philosopher, Leibniz,
responsible for the concept of apperception. Apperception is the act
necessary for an individual to become aware of the events Leibniz adopted a
reflective vision of attention by considering that it is automatically
directed to the events and ideas that require it, although he also admitted
a volitive dimension of will, by affirming that attention is a disposition
of the soul that allows us to know some things instead of others. We have
another philosopher, Herbar. He agrees with Leibniz that an event can be
perceived in order to access the conscious experience, but he emphasized
that perception is a mechanism that relates new ideas with the ideas
already housed in the mind. Herbar is also among the first authors who
warned about the importance of mathematical models for the study of
psychology. We must also bear in mind that there have been widespread
observations in the first part of the 19th century that showed that
people's inability to attend more than one event at a time we have the
philosopher Hamilton who warned, on the contrary, that the range or
interval of attention could exceed that of a single object. Hamilton
proposed to measure that range by throwing balls in the form of canicas on
the ground to determine how many of them could be apprehended
simultaneously. That interval was later estimated at about four items. We
go back to the period from 1860 to 1909. In the mid-19th century, 1860, the
so-called psycho-physical methods were developed that allowed to measure
the relationship between physical stimulation and the corresponding
psychological response. This led to contemplate the possibility that
attention could be analyzed from within the laboratory by applying an
experimental approach. That is why we are going to see first the speed of
mental processes. Paul Wilhelm Wundt was awarded the first laboratory of
psychological research in 1879 He was responsible for introducing the study
to attention in the experimental field. Wundt realized that he was
measuring for the first time the speed of mental processes thinking that
this would crystallize a true experimental psychology of
self-consciousness. It was Donders later on and his students who carried
out the first detailed research on the duration of mental processes.
Donders considered that the time that a particular mental process takes in
a simple task could be estimated by incorporating this process into another
more complex task to finally calculate the difference in reaction time
between both tasks. This method of computing the duration of a mental
process is known as the subtractive method. Other experiments were carried
out by Exner, in which he warned the existence of a kind of voluntary
preparation or prior disposition towards the stimulus that was going to be
presented along with the reflected response caused by said stimulus. Other
researchers, Merkel and others, demonstrated for the first time in 1885
that the reaction time increased as they did the number of alternative
stimulus-response experiments. Let's look at the effects of attention.
Henshaw considered that attention was something necessary for visual
perception. Performing the same thing as an experimental subject and using
a spectroscopy, he discovered that attention had certain limits because
sometimes the letters close to the central point were not perceived
automatically. Wundt argued that attention was an internal activity that
allowed the ideas of consciousness to flourish according to certain
degrees, advancing the current proposals. Wundt also argued that attention
focus could be narrowed or widened. According to Wundt, attention contains
three essential components that affect ideas. Increasing clarity, a set of
muscle sensations, and certain feelings that emerge along with them.
Continuing with the effects of attention, authors like Lotze did not accept
the vision that attention is simply an intense illumination of the content
of ideas. Instead, Lotze understood that the lower-level processes, such as
the simple sensory experience, are not always accompanied by high-level
processes that participate in the comparison between simple relationships
and previous experiences. On the other hand, other studies discovered that
the conditions of an attention act had to be located both in the task to be
carried out and in the individual's As his name indicates, the attentional
disposition refers to the configuration of a tendency or attitude to
respond to a stimulus in a certain way. Pillsbury stated that the essence
of attention, understood as a conscious process, is an increase in the
clarity of an idea or set of ideas at the expense of another idea Let's
look at William James' vision of the effects of attention, which is one of
the most well-known in psychology and therefore one of the most frequently
quoted. William James said that the attention consists of the mind taking
possession in a clear and lucid way of one or several objects or chains of
thought that appear simultaneously. This implies leaving aside some things
in order to approach other things effectively. James' mention of the
clarity of attention is contemplated by other authors as the most relevant
aspect of this psychological mechanism of attention. Kistner insisted on
this issue by stating that the problem of attention has to be focused
Understanding attention as a mechanism that increases the clarity of ideas
forced researchers to ask about the ways in which this increase is
obtained. In this line, some researchers favored the idea that the increase
of clarity occurred directly. There were other researchers for whom the
increase was indirect or caused by the inhibition of those sensations of
attention. James finally deduced that clarity is the most relevant
characteristic of attention, as well as to affirm that my conscious
experience is constituted by what I attend to. This profiles a selective
vision of attention according to the functionalist perspective adopted by
James. James considered that attention could be classified in various ways.
directed to sensory stimuli or to the ideas or mental representations of
the object. He also said that attention acts either immediately or for a
long time and that attention can be passive, reflective, involuntary or, on
the other hand, active and voluntary. There are many who claim that from
the First World War until the 1960s there was no research on attention, or
that attention practically disappeared from 1930 onwards. The research on
the mechanism of attention not only did not disappear but the work done
acted as a bridge between the previous research in 1910 and the current
contemporary studies. Yersil published his classic Mental Monography which
is one of the contributions to the mental set and shift. Another
contribution of great relevance in the period from 1910 of the so-called
psychological refractory period. This idea by Telford carried out an
experiment to give an answer to which the neuron was much less sensitive to
a new stimulation. The fact that the reaction time for a second stimulus
was higher when the interval between stimulating presentations was reduced
has been a phenomenon studied since then. We also have in this period
Stroop who published one of the most cited works in psychology in which it
is demonstrated how information that is irrelevant to perform a task can
seriously affect it. The presence of conflicting information of a word is
the Stroop phenomenon. The color of ink which is different from the color
written in the word. This conflicting information almost doubled the time
dedicated to the task of naming the color of ink. Since then this
phenomenon is known as Stroop effect and it is one of the most popular in
psychology. In this period important discoveries were made in the field of
We move on to the period from 1950 to 1974. Here in this period the most
studied aspect is the interest in studying human cognition from the
theoretical framework of information processing. This resurgence is called
cognitive revolution. It has its origins both in the development of
information theory and in the process of processing. In this period Mcwhore
in 1950 carried out work on the maintenance of surveillance whose interest
lasted throughout the 20th century. He designed a test called clock test to
evaluate attention in a vigilance task. Colin Cherry also carried out one
of the most transcendent works of this period. Teleparty. Cherry was
interested in knowing how the selection of a voice was produced among
several other voices. He was interested in what kind of information could
be remembered from unanswered messages. We also have in this period from
1950 to 1974 Donald Bradbent who carried out an experiment similar to that
of Cherry using a dichotic listening task. To explain his discovery and
that of Cherry Bradbent developed what has become the first model or filter
theory. This model considers the nervous system as a communication channel
with limited capacity. The original filter theory proposes that messages
that are not attended because they are not able to pass through the filter
because these messages can never be identified. In this period we also have
a researcher who reformulated the rigid filter theory of Bradbent proposing
in its place the so-called attenuated filter theory. This proposal
understands that the prior or early selection of the information exerted by
the filter continues to be prior to the identification of the stimulus. But
now the mission of the filter is not to completely block the unattended
channel but simply to attenuate that channel. In this period from 1950 to
1974 we have Deus and Deus who adopted a different vision of filter models.
They proposed that the information of the channel not attended was always
identified and that the bottle neck imposed by the selection of the
information occurred in phases of processing much later to those defended
by theorists as proactors. At the beginning of the 70s there was an
important change in the study of attention caused by the introduction of
visual tasks used in the previous years. The Kahneman model is undoubtedly
the most representative among all models of unitary resource or unitary
capacity. This model considers attention as a generic resource or energy
mode that can be distributed between different tasks and in various
quantities. The available supply of this resource varies depending on the
activity or the activity of the organism as well as the demands of the
task. If the demands exceed the energy supply of the organism strategic
decisions must be made to clarify which tasks or processes have priority
during the assignment of that resource. It is important to note human
studies in which psychophysiological techniques were used to study
attention. Psychophysiological techniques such as magnetic resonance, etc.
These studies used evocative potential techniques that by placing
electrodes on the scalp allowed to link brain activity especially on
auditory attention. The most appropriate contribution was the emergence of
numerous theoretical models on attention elaborated under the theoretical
framework of information processing whose beginning was marked by the
proposal of Proazven in 1958 and his filter theory. Finally, from 1975 to
the present day research on attention has increased spectacularly. Unitary
resource models have given way to multiple resource models. Navon and
Gott-Kopper proposed that attention could be understood better as a set of
different multiple resources than as a general and unspecific resource. The
principles of the approach of multiple resources were applied by Wickers in
the field of human factor. A variation of the metaphor of focus is the
integration theory of characteristics. This theory intends to explain the
results obtained in visual search tasks in which subjects must detect
whether a relevant stimulus is present or not in a set of relevant stimuli.
The alternative perspective to these theories and models based on space
defends that they are the primary units on which attention operates. These
models based on the object were propelled to demonstrate that processing
was difficult was directed towards two different objects under conditions
in which the spatial factors were totally equal. Perhaps the model focused
on the most well-known object is Duncan and Humphreys. At this time,
studies of priming have also proliferated over the last few years in the
field of attention. prior or preparatory that precedes another posterior
stimulus to which the subject must respond. Priming can be identical to
proof or differ in some attributes. The first is an effect of positive
priming or automatic facilitation that arises not only when proof and proof
are identical, but also in situations where they are different. The effect
of negative priming refers to a slowdown of the response in the proof essay
when the stimulus that had to be ignored in the previous priming is now the
relevant stimulus to which Another perspective that has enjoyed enormous
popularity in this period is the selection for action. Defended by Neumann
and Alford, who propose that the last attention limitations should not be
attributed to the presence of a mechanism of limited artificial capacity
during this period. He has also dedicated to provide evidence on the brain
mechanisms that lead to attention. Finally, in the last decades there have
been remarkable advances in translating the theories and methodologies of
attention psychology into the applied field. For example, have developed a
new method of thinking about how the brain functions. For example,