ABSTRACT
Despite the precedent that Ribot set, attention was rarely mentioned by the behaviourists, who dominated psychology in the rst decades of the twentieth century (see Chapter 6 in this volume, by Braddon-Mitchell). This is because twentieth-century psychological behaviourism was committed to giving its theories as sets of rules governing the mapping from stimuli to behavioural responses. Attention can’t be captured in a theory with that form (because the stimuli to which one can attend, and the responses that one can make attentively, are only slightly less diverse than one’s entire perceptual and behavioural repertoire). Attention was among the phenomena that behaviourists wanted to leave out of their picture of the mind.
