Attention and Mental Retardation

Attention and Distraction There is a substantial literature on attention, the study of which was be­ gun in psychology as the introspective investigation of a mental faculty or power (see Woodworth & Schlosberg, 1954). Thus Titchener sought to measure "attensity," the clearness or vividness of a sensation achiev­ ed by concentrating attention upon it, and from this approach has come the notion of attention as having a focus (or center) and a fringe (or periphery)-like the beam of a flashlight. With the disenchantment with introspection as a source of reliable data, the topic of attention was large­ ly abandoned as such, although the "orienting reaction"-called by Pav­ lov the "investigatory" or "what-is-it reflex" -by which animals (in­ cluding man) orient themselves to new stimuli, became a central concept in classical (respondent) conditioning. It has been said that "the 'orient­ ing reflex' is an operationally defined concept which corresponds in part to the conditions of usage of the consciousness-centered concept of 'at­ tention' [Maltzman & Raskin, 1965, p. 10]," though it has not been es­ tablished that it invariably accompanies attention. The recent revival of the study of attention, however, has been mainly due to the importance in military and industrial technology of tasks requiring vigilance (the monitoring of a stimulus display for the detection of intermittent signals over an extended time period) or responses to simultaneous and compet­ ing stimuli, and such study has centered on attending behavior rather than on attention as a mental process or entity (Treisman, 1966). Because the information-carrying capacity of his nervous system is