Event Date
This talk will provide an account of attention's emergence as a research object at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that experimental psychologists turn to attention not because of its obvious implications for cognition, business, and everyday life, but rather because many of them are becoming bored by their own work. As researchers butt up against the difficulty of paying attention to more and more minute experimental tasks, they come to see attention in a new light. The result is the transformation from attention as independent variable, used to aid the study of other mental phenomena, to dependent variable—with implications for the rise of applied psychology as well as anxieties about attention that are still with us today.
Dr. Cowles is the author of The Scientific Method: An evolution of thinking from Darwin to Dewey and the organizer of a recent special issue of Historical Studies in Natural Sciences on "How to be an expert," as well as a series of essays on the sciences in Dune for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
This event is co-sponsored by the Early Science Workshop and the Department of Science and Technology Studies.