The science of attention was shaped by military-industrial funding imperatives.

Evidence

The primary funders of such work were immensely concerned with human beings as reliable components of big, expensive, intricate systems. The military-industrial complex increasingly placed human beings at critical nodes in breathtakingly powerful and costly machines (and arrays of machines). For their purposes, what was relevant about “human attention” was the way its parameters established the limits and characteristics of human-machine integration. — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 130

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the military-industrial genealogy of other ‘neutral’ sciences (naval hydrodynamics, GPS, computing) documented in the reader’s prior reading.