LECTURE NOTES ON ATTENTION. 



An Illustration of the Employment of Neurological 

 Analogies for Psychical Problems. 



C. L. Herrick. 



At once a most difficult and a most important group of 

 problems is offered in the study of attention. The importance 

 grows, on one hand, out of the close connection of attention 

 and its cultivation with the practical obligations of pedagogy, 

 and, on the other, out of the theoretical relations of attention 

 with fundamental mental endowments like volition and apper- 

 ception. 



The source of the difficulty is also two-fold ; first, the at- 

 tempts at experimental study of attention suffer from the ambig- 

 uity that, when all is done, the results are all apparently physi- 

 ological rather than psychological. But this is only a conspicu- 

 ous instance of what is true of experimental psychology as a 

 whole. Care is necessary to discriminate the content in the 

 mind from the physical accompaniments unless one is prepared 

 to ignore that distinction entirely. The second difficulty is that 

 different observers have different theoretical points of view and 

 an unbiased stand-point is as impossible as it would be unpro- 

 ductive. The purposeless and indiscriminate collection of facts 

 rarely furthers science. Working hypotheses and a willing- 

 ness to reject them when evidence requires are the theoretically 

 desirable conditions, though in practice the willingness to reject 

 is on the part of some other observer or critic (none the less 

 salutary in the result). 



It seems proper to divide attention into (A) external or 

 sensory and (B) internal or cognitional. This is merely a work- 

 ing division corresponding to the common experience that some- 

 thing may "catch the eye," on one hand, and that we "con- 

 centrate our thought " on a problem, on the other. It would 



