CHAPTER 3

DOING A NUMBER ON YOU,

THE MEASUREMENT OF ATTENTION

No matter how well informed or earnest your attempts to manage attention, you can’t know how well you’re doing or improve your performance—or that of your organization—unless you can measure the results of your efforts. Until the late 1990s, measuring attention has been a rather awkward affair dependent on self-reporting techniques, sound perception, or eye movements.

We’ll take a look at the early days of attention measurement and the state of the art in attention monitoring.

A Brief History

It should be no surprise that first radio and then the television industry led the way in attention-measuring approaches. If you’re paying big bucks for commercial time, you want to know who’s ...

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