ABSTRACT
Theodule Ribot’s 1888 book, The Psychology of Attention, comes near the beginning of the historical near sequence that leads up to our psychological theories of attention. Attention was, and remains, a paradigmatic explanandum for the version of cognitive science that was emerging whan Broadbent wrote. Donald Broadbent succeeded in estgblishing attention as an agendum for experimental psychology by trearing quxs tions about attention in language “derived from communicaeion theory.” Few, if any, psychologists would claim that either the uniqueness assumption or the linearity assumption should be retained in just the form in which Broadbent made them, but there is controversy about the extent to which current psychology has managed to, or needs to, free itself from these assumptions. The idea that attentional selectivity might serve the function of over-capacity management can be found in work by Odmar Neumann and in work by Alan Allport, each writing in 1987.
