The Attentional/Dot Probe Paradigm, Provenance Integrity, and the Architecture of Erasure: A Documentary Case Study in Scientific Attribution

This paper integrates, expands, and suoersedes earlier preliminary papers concerniung the origins of the attention/dot probe paradigm. Abstract: The dot-probe paradigm is commonly treated as originating in the 1986 paper by MacLeod, Mathews, and Tata, which introduced a visual task for investigating attentional bias in emotional disorders. This article reconstructs an earlier documented origin: an auditory attentional-probe paradigm devised and implemented in 1981 in an undergraduate dissertation at University College London under the supervision of Norman Dixon. The central methodological innovation of that earlier work was the use of a neutral response to a neutral probe as an indirect index of attentional allocation, thereby addressing the response-bias problem that had long complicated research on perceptual defence, vigilance, and emotional processing. The article places the 1981 dissertation, the 1986 Journal of Abnormal Psychology paper, later published statements by Andrew Mathews, correction notices issued by Taylor & Francis concerning Michael Eysenck's publications, Eysenck's later admissions, Colin MacLeod's retrospective denial, and institutional and editorial responses into a single documentary account. It then proposes an explanatory framework, the architecture of erasure, comprising seven interacting mechanisms: omission, minimisation, absorption, appropriation, retrospective reconstruction, institutional containment, and editorial deferral. The article gives particular attention to the responses of Royal Holloway, Birkbeck, Taylor & Francis, the University of Western Australia, St George's, the American Psychological Association/Journal of Abnormal Psychology, and Cognition & Emotion. Across these processes, important elements of the historical claim were acknowledged, but no public correction was issued that altered the canonical attribution of the paradigm to the 1986 paper. The case is situated within wider literatures on scientific credit, the Matthew effect, the Matilda effect, historical silencing, plagiarism struggles, institutional betrayal, and epistemic injustice. The article concludes that provenance integrity - the accurate attribution of ideas, methods, paradigms, and routes of transmission - should be treated as a substantive dimension of research integrity. Keywords: attentional probe paradigm; dot-probe paradigm; attentional bias; scientific attribution; provenance integrity; plagiarism; institutional containment; history of psychology; architecture of erasure; research integrity Author note: The author is the subject of the historical claim examined in this article. The article is presented as a documentary case study. Documentary correspondence and institutional materials cited here are described so that readers can distinguish published sources, private correspondence, institutional findings, and interpretive commentary.