The Problem of Attention

Ever since psychology became an independent branch of knowledge, psychologists in very different areas have, for a variety of reasons, unanimously denied that attention is an independent form of mental activity. Some have done this because they deny in general the activity of the subject and reduce all forms of mental activity to different manifestations of the same general mechanism—associations, or the formation of structures; others have done so because they identify attention with various mental functions or with some aspect of them. Indeed, there is no function or combination of functions, or even a mental phenomenon—from "directedness" to "a change in the organization" of mental activity, from "dark" kinesthetic sensation and motor sets to consciousness as a whole—that has not been identified with attention.1