Licence: In copyright
Credit: Attention / by W.B. Pillsbury. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.
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![the differences in attention which we find in different in- dividuals, and in the same individual at different times ? To all of these questions it can give no answer. There is nothing in the theory to say when these wide-spread motor disturbances are to occur, or which movement is likely to produce any particular kind of attention. Both of these problems must be faced before the theory can expect to have any great value as an explanation of the attentive phenomena. The incentive to the theory seems to have come indirectly from the popular tendency to regard the activity which accompanies the attention process as its cause. In dis- cussing the feeling of effort in an earlier chapter we saw that it can be analysed into strain sensations which arise from the contraction of muscles in different parts of the body. If we start with the assumption that the feeling of activity is the cause of attention, then we are logically driven to the explanation which Ribot gives of its origin. Move- ment, the real basis of the feeling of activity, would be the true cause of attention. We have shown at some length that this primary assumption is fallacious, and so Ribot’s entire theory falls to the ground. Of similar character, but stated in a form that makes it more difficult to advance facts either for or against it, is the Aktionstheorie of Munsterberg.[8] It might be called an incipient movement theory. Briefly stated, it is that each sensory nervous process becomes conscious only as it goes over into motor paths, although the discharge need not be great enough to produce movements. The vividness of a sensation depends upon the degree of excitation that it pro- duces in the motor or efferent nerve paths. Most of the objections that were raised against the Ribot theory would hold as well against Munsterberg, with the exception that no one knows whether all sensory processes do thus pro- duce centrifugal effects, and therefore we can know nothing of their time relations if the theory is valid. Like the former theory, however, it would, if true, give no explanation of the likelihood of attending in advance of the process, and](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21523630_0300.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
