A Beginner's Psychology

by Edward Bradford Titchener

(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.