Twentieth-century attention science was driven by Cold War input-output thinking

Evidence

We think those are good questions to ask! And as we have suggested here, we think there are answers. To sum up, and put it simply, the twentieth-century laboratory study of the thing called “attention” was, when one really digs in and investigates it, almost entirely a research project driven by very specific Cold War thinking. The model of the human person from which this research moved was a model of an input-output device, and the laboratory scenarios that were used to examine attention focused almost exclusively on stimulus-and-response scenarios. At issue? The problem at the heart of information-intensive systems where humans had to sit in front of machines (in factories, radar stations, and communication networks). — The Friends of Attention, Attensity!, 155

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to cybernetics (Wiener, the human-machine loop) and to the soundscape books on how industrial-technological imperatives shaped perception science. — connects to: Nobel prestige surged after World War II as America’s Cold War science hegemony rose — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 455
• SEED: The ‘input-output human’ genealogy — from radar operators through factory monitoring to smartphone screen-time — as a through-line article on how attention got colonized by war and advertising.