Attention and Arousal: Cognition and Performance

The thinker who has a mortal fear of being wrong will give all that is valuable in himself to that little ambition. Walter Lippmann (1914) Psychology has always been plagued by passing fads and fan­ cies to a greater extent than is seemly in a scientific discipline. Over the past few years the Zeitgeist can be summed up by the two words 'cognitive psychology'. Indeed, a recent poll of academic psychologists in American indicated that over 80% of them regarded themselves as cognitive psychol...