A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins.

  • Mary Whiton Calkins
Date:
1910
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A first book in psychology / by Mary Whiton Calkins. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    120/446 page 102
    company attention are more readily described. They are of two sorts: in the first place, contractions, usually instinctive, of the muscular apparatus of the sense-organs, tending to adapt these organs to the conditions of distinct consciousness. For example, we instinctively change the convergence or the accommodation of our eyes in order to obtain a distincter out¬ line of the object which interests us; we turn our heads tow¬ ard the source of the music to which we are attending; and we follow a moving object with our eyes. Muscular contrac¬ tions of this sort are, of course, peculiar to sense-attention. A second class of muscular contractions is characteristic of all sorts of attention — such contractions, namely, as prevent disturbing movements of any sort. The rigidity and stillness of the body is, indeed, an obvious accompaniment of attention. In the successive sections of this chapter attention has been described as elemental ‘attributive’ consciousness; the object of attention has been distinguished as a relatively stable part of the total field of consciousness and as sensation¬ ally novel, or affectively toned, or associatively connected; attention has been distinguished as instinctive or acquired, involuntary or voluntary, and, finally, the bodily correlates of attention have been indicated. It remains to speak briefly of what may be named the results of attention. First and most important is the normal recurrence of the attentive consciousness. In concrete terms, we are likely to remember what we attend to, and, conversely, we forget what we inat¬ tentively experience.* In the second place, attention determines the direction of my * For experiments, cf. E. L. Thorndike, “The Elements of Psychology,” p. 107, Exps. 10 and ix.
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