Abstract:
This talk will cover the emergence of attention as an object of psychological study at the end of the nineteenth century. Specifically, it addresses how psychologists shifted from assuming they had control of subjects' attention as a tool for studying other phenomena to studying attention in its own right. My hope is that we can discuss both current research paradigms related to attention (e.g. eye-tracking) as well as other examples of this arc from independent to dependent variable and/or how experimental tools end up becoming the objects of experiment.