Some Aspects of Attention 293 



ogous in its psychic aspect to the blank emptiness of the 

 hypnotic trance than to alert, watchful attention. 



Yet although, in so far as attention is a state favoring 

 discrimination of stimuli, it is involved in that part of an 

 animal's behavior which is derived from individual expe- 

 rience, since pure instinct discriminates but roughly; in so 

 far as it is still one of the devices for securing reaction to 

 stimuli of vital importance, its root must lie in instinct. No 

 object wholly unrelated to some fundamental instinct can 

 hope to secure attention, for the great classes of vitally 

 important stimuli have all of them preformed paths in the 

 nervous system by which their reactions are secured. What 

 individual experience does is to refine upon the adaptations 

 which instinct makes possible ; to bring about the connection 

 of certain stimuli, originally indifferent, with the performance 

 of an instinctive response, or to produce a checking of the 

 instinctive response when certain individual peculiarities 

 of a stimulus that would otherwise call it forth become 

 evident. For instance, an animal learns by experience to 

 come at the call of a human being who feeds it ; the sound, 

 originally without effect on its reactions, has come to be 

 connected with the nervous mechanism of an instinct. The 

 chick pecking at small objects on the ground learns by ex- 

 perience to inhibit this instinctive response with reference 

 to objects having certain peculiarities originally undiscrimi- 

 nated, but now in some way emphasized through painful 

 circumstances accompanying his previous encounter with 

 them. 



The most fundamental characteristic of attention, then, 

 is perhaps that aspect of it which has been called abstrac- 

 tion, the diminished effectiveness of stimuli not attended to. 

 By virtue of this aspect we recognize that attention belongs 

 with instinct as being concerned in securing the prepotency 



