Introduction

It is evident that “attention” is a term used to refer to different phenomena and processes, not only by psychologists, but also in common usage of the word. This seems to have been the case throughout the history of psychology. The same word is applied to different aspects of situations and experiences in everyday speech and defined differently by different psychologists. One of the reasons for the rise of the behaviourist movement in psychology was the difficulty psychologists at the turn of the 20th century were having in formulating precise definitions of terms such as “attention” and “consciousness”. Psychology had grown out of mental philosophy to become the “science of mind”, but unless it was clear what was meant by the terms used in explanations, psychology could not be truly scientific. The famous behaviourist J. B. Watson (1919) wrote:

If I were to ask you to tell me what you mean by the terms you have been in the habit of using I could soon make you tongue-tied. I believe I could even convince you that you do not know what you mean by them. You have been using them uncritically as a part of your social and literary tradition. (p. 6)

Behaviourism aimed to purge psychology of its use of everyday psychological terms and provide a true science of behaviour without recourse to any intervening variables in the “mind”. The problem for psychologists of the behaviourist tradition was that the “mind” was not so easy to banish from explanations of human performance. Behaviour could be scientifically observed and stimulus-response relationships discovered, but unobservable internal mechanisms such as “attention”, however poorly defined, which evidently allow adaptive goal directed behaviour could not be experimented on. They were not amenable to explanation in terms of simple stimulus response associations.