IS VOLUNTARY ATTENTION A RESULTANT OR A FORCE?
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
James, William
Figs. 37 & 38.
It is for this reason that men have no eyes but for those aspects of things which they have already been taught to discern. Any one of us can notice a phenomenon after it has once been pointed out, which not one in ten thousand could ever have discovered for himself. Even in poetry and the arts, some one has to come and tell us what aspects we may single out, and what effects we may admire, before our æsthetic nature can 'dilate' to its full extent and never 'with the wrong emotion.' In kindergarten instruction one of the exercises is to make the children see how many features they can point out in such an object as a flower or a stuffed bird. They readily name the features they know already, such as leaves, tail, bill, feet. But they may look for hours without distinguishing nostrils, claws, scales, etc., until their attention is called to these details; thereafter, however, they see them every time. In short, the only things which we commonly see are those which we preperceive. and the only things which we preperceive are those which have been labelled for us, and the labels stamped into our mind. If we lost our stock of labels we should be intellectually lost in the midst of the world.
Organic adjustment, then, and ideational preparation or preperception are concerned in all attentive acts. An interesting theory is defended by no less authorities than Professors Bain[370] and Ribot,[371] and still more ably advocated by Mr. N. Lange,[372] who will have it that the ideational preparation itself is a consequence of muscular adjustment, so that the latter may be called the essence of the attentive process throughout. This at least is what the theory of these authors practically amounts to, though the former two do not state it in just these terms. The proof consists in the exhibition of cases of intellectual attention which organic adjustment accompanies, or of objects in thinking which we have to execute a movement. Thus Lange says that when he tries to imagine a certain colored circle, he finds himself first making with his eyes the movement to which the circle corresponds, and then imagining the color, etc., as a consequence of the movement.
"Let my reader," he adds, "close his eyes and think of an extended object, for instance a pencil. He will easily notice that he first makes a slight movement [of the eyes] corresponding to the straight line, and that he often gets a weak feeling of innervation of the hand as if touching the pencil's surface. So, in thinking of a certain sound, we turn towards its direction or repeat muscularly its rhythm, or articulate an imitation of it."[373]
But it is one thing to point out the presence of muscular contractions as constant concomitants of our thoughts, and another thing to say, with Herr Lange, that thought is made possible by muscular contraction alone. It may well be that where the object of thought consists of two parts, one perceived by movement and another not, the part perceived by movement is habitually called up first and fixed in the mind by the movement's execution, whilst the other part comes secondarily as the movement's mere associate. But even were this the rule with all men (which I doubt[374]), it would only be a practical habit, not an ultimate necessity. In the chapter on the Will we shall learn that movements themselves are results of images coming before the mind, images sometimes of feelings in the moving part, sometimes of the movement's effects on eye and ear, and sometimes (if the movement be originally reflex or instinctive), of its natural stimulus or exciting cause. It is, in truth, contrary to all wider and deeper analogies to deny that any quality of feeling whatever can directly rise up in the form of an idea, and to assert that only ideas of movement can call other ideas to the mind.
So much for adjustment and preperception. The only third process I can think of as always present is the inhibition of irrelevant movements and ideas. This seems, however, to be a feature incidental to voluntary attention rather than the essential feature of attention at large,[375] and need not concern us particularly now. Noting merely the intimate connection which our account so far establishes between attention, on the one hand, and imagination, discrimination, and memory, on the other, let us draw a couple of practical inferences, and then pass to the more speculative problem that remains.
The practical inferences are pedagogic. First, to strengthen attention in children who care nothing for the subject they are studying and let their wits go wool-gathering. The interest here must be 'derived' from something that the teacher associates with the task, a reward or a punishment if nothing less external comes to mind. Prof. Ribot says:
"A child refuses to read; he is incapable of keeping his mind fixed on the letters, which have no attraction for him; but he looks with avidity upon the pictures contained in a book. 'What do they mean?' he asks. The father replies: 'When you can read, the book will tell you.' After several colloquies like this, the child resigns himself and falls to work, first slackly, then the habit grows, and finally he shows an ardor which has to be restrained. This is a case of the genesis of voluntary attention. An artificial and indirect desire has to be grafted on a natural and direct one. Reading has no immediate attractiveness, but it has a borrowed one, and that is enough. The child is caught in the wheelwork, the first step is made."
I take another example, from M. B. Perez:[376]
"A child of six years, habitually prone to mind-wandering, sat down one day to the piano of his own accord to repeat an air by which his mother had been charmed. His exercises lasted an hour. The same child at the age of seven, seeing his brother busy with tasks in vacation, went and sat at his father's desk. 'What are you doing there?' his nurse said, surprised at so finding him. 'I am,' said the child, 'learning a page of German; it isn't very amusing, but it is for an agreeable surprise to mamma.'"
Here, again, a birth of voluntary attention, grafted this time on a sympathetic instead of a selfish sentiment like that of the first example. The piano, the German, awaken no spontaneous attention; but they arouse and maintain it by borrowing a force from elsewhere.[377]
Second, take that mind-wandering which at a later age may trouble us whilst reading or listening to a discourse. If attention be the reproduction of the sensation from within, the habit of reading not merely with the eye, and of listening not merely with the ear, but of articulating to one's self the words seen or heard, ought to deepen one's attention to the latter. Experience shows that this is the case. I can keep my wandering mind a great deal more closely upon a conversation or a lecture if I actively re-echo to myself the words than if I simply hear them; and I find a number of my students who report benefit from voluntarily adopting a similar course.[378]
Second, a teacher who wishes to engage the attention of his class must knit his novelties on to things of which they already have preperceptions. The old and familiar is readily attended to by the mind and helps to hold in turn the new, forming, in Herbartian phraseology, an 'Apperceptionsmasse' for it. Of course it is in every case a very delicate problem to know what 'Apperceptionsmasse' to use. Psychology can only lay down the general rule.