ABSTRACT
According to Titchener, a student of Wundt: ‘The doctrine of attention is the nerve of the whole psychological system’.1
However, the Gestalt psychologists (see Box 9.1 in Chapter 9) believed that the concept of attention was unnecessary (a stimulus array’s properties were sufficient to predict the perceptual response to it: see Chapter 16). The behaviourists argued that, since ‘attention’ was unobservable, it was not worthy of experimental study (see Chapters 10 and 14).
