Hocus Focus: how ideas about attention were shaped in applied psychology laboratories and in public discussions about vulnerable viewers and hypnotizing screens (1950 – 1970)
How has psychology research contributed to concerns about a “digital attention crisis”? Contemporary media, such as social media apps on smartphones, are often characterized as taking advantage of attention, trapping users in coercive feedback loops —a strategy purportedly shaped by research in experimental and social psychology (Haidt 2024; Zuboff 2020). Yet, scholars have cautioned against reductive narratives that portray Silicon Valley engineers or the Chinese government as behaviourist manipulators wielding psychological expertise to extract and monetize attention (Fitzgerald 2022).
With “Hocus Focus” I investigate the shaping of novel ideas about attention and attentional subjects, tracing their histories from experimental set-ups in applied psychology laboratories to wider public debates about hypnotizing screens and susceptible audiences of new media in the period of the 1950s until the 1960s. My research contributes to an emergent interdisciplinary body of “critical attention studies” (Rogers 2014; Burnett 2023; Campo & Citton 2024) which aims to de-essentialize and de-reify notions of attention. It also adds to genealogical histories that denaturalize today’s attention anxieties, instead showing shifting norms and “crises” of attention (Crary 1999; Hagner 2003; Daston 2004; North 2011; Löffler 2013; Campo 2022).
My study directly builds on historical research that has pointed to a striking reductionist conceptualization of attention emerging during the Second World War, when applied psychologists sought to optimize the performance of military radar operators and air traffic controllers (Rogers 2014; Geoghegan 2019; Brendecke 2022). These experiments introduced to the discourse of attention foundational paradigms such as “vigilance” (sustained watchfulness) and “load” (the impact of excessive stimuli), which are still influential in cognitive psychology today. The result is a narrow understanding of attention as exclusively task-oriented concentration, prone to failure. This overlooks other dimensions of attention such as the significance of mind-wandering, the influence of social relationships, or the unpredictability of real-world environments.
Leveraging this critical genealogical insight, my work takes a crucial next step to understand shifts in the history of attention. I turn to the understudied history of applied perception psychology research in the Netherlands during the so-called “cognitive revolution” in the 1950s and the “golden age” of studying attention in the 1960s (Sanders 1998).
I examine how applied psychology researchers working at the Instituut voor Zintuigfysiologie (IZF, part of the National Defense Research organisation TNO, started in 1948) and the Instituut voor Perceptieonderzoek (IPO, jointly operated by Philips and the Technical University Eindhoven, started in 1957), began to grapple with the complexities of attention in a notable shift away from military applications to other subjects. New experimental set-ups with screens and displays were built to test the performance of professionals working with information and communication technologies, such as traffic operators, industrial inspectors, administrative workers, telephone operators, medical image specialist and television viewers. My study shows how this period of expansion in applied psychological research contributed to novel understandings of attentional subjects—individuals perceived as possessing agency through selective focus yet remaining vulnerable to captivation.
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