A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

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.