ABSTRACT
Many of the most important concepts in psychology have proved elusive to define and frustrating to study. The prime example is probably intelligence. Another is attention. The difficulties of finding comprehensive definitions of such constructs that map cleanly onto an agreed-upon, comprehensive sets of methods and measures are well illustrated by the decades of work on both topics. Yet in both cases, the obvious evidence of such psychological processes in everyday life is sufficient to maintain healthy research efforts and continuing attempts to harness the concepts theoretically. In 1890, William James said of attention that “everyone knows what [it] is”; for James, it implied withdrawing from something in order to deal effectively with others (James 1890/1950, p. 403). Since that time, researchers have used attention to mean, inter alia, selection, search, mental effort, concentration, and arousal, risking the possibility, as Eysenck and Keane (1990) remarked, that a concept “used to explain everything” might “turn out to explain nothing.” Still the interest in attention perseveres.
