ABSTRACT

The summer of 1967 saw what may have been the first ever international symposium devoted explicitly to problems of Attention, when Sanders (1967) arranged a meeting at the Institute for Perception at Soesterberg in the Netherlands. This meeting put the seal of respectability on the prodigal who had been reintroduced to polite psychological society in 1958 by Broadbent, in his book Perception and Communication. Despite an auspicious beginning, research on attention had fallen into disrepute during the out-and-out Behaviourist period.