History

A Brief History of Attention **Early History ** The first time attention was mentioned scientifically was in 1649 by Descartes, who defined it as "movements of the pineal body, acting on the animal spirits" (Itti, Rees, & Tsotsos. 2005). Malebranch (1674) was the first person to provide a method for keeping attention. He created procedures for "cultivating" attention, which were used for his studies in geometry (Itti et al., 2005).

Wolff (1734) followed closely by Leibnitz (1765) were the first to relate attention with consciousness. The struggle between the unconscious ideas that existed in our mind and the ideas in attention fueled this study. Hamilton (1859) was the first to raise concern on the idea of the span of attention where the question of how many items can our mind process at once came into study (Itti, Rees, & Tsotsos. 2005). The earliest behavioral findings occurred in 1871 by Jevons. One of his studies involved throwing beans into a box and seeing how many he could count in one mental span. (Itti, Rees, & Tsotsos. 2005). **Contemporary Research (1950-2000) **

Literature was scarce at the time on attention due to Watson's outbreak of behavioral psychology at the time. Cherry began his research with the Dichotic Listening Technique Study (1953). Two different messages were played through each side of a pair of headphones. The goal of this study was to interpret how information is processed by the brain. Cherry found that pitch and the disappearance of the message increased the chance the message would be noticed (Pashler, 1998). Using some conceptual framework from Cherry Broadbent created his filter theory (Moray, 2007). The filter theory stated that a human being receives information through many different channels and this information is then sent to a single channel called the "P-System". Since this amount of information at one time can overload the channel, we have a filter which only allows some of this information to go through at one time. The overflow is saved in our short-term memory and then processed (Swets & Kristofferson, 1970). The goal of these early scientists was not about practical real world application, but rather the basic mechanics of our attention using solely auditory stimuli.

One of the main problems that auditory based research was encountering is that it was difficult to control the amount and types of stimuli given to the participant. Later researchers from recent decades have opted more in favor of visual stimuli. The reasoning behind this shift is that visual stimuli allow the researchers to better control exactly which stimuli are being processed by the subject (Pashler, 1998). As research continued, many different theories and studies of attention came about all with varying ideas on filters and how exactly this information is being processed. Notable theories that are still recognized today include the Feature-Integration theory by Treisman (1986), Similarity Theory (Duncan & Humphreys, 1992), Moray's Selective Filter Model, and the Attenuation Model by Treisman.