Prior Entry

Abstract

The law of prior entry was one of Titchener's seven fundamental laws of attention. According to E.B. Titchener (1908, “Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention,” Macmillan, New York, p. 251): “the object of attention comes to consciousness more quickly than the objects which we are not attending to.” Although research on prior entry spans more than a century, agreement on the very existence of the phenomenon has proved elusive. While some researchers are convinced of the veracity of the prior entry effect, others have argued that the empirical evidence is unconvincing. However, the last few years have seen a rapid growth of interest in the phenomenon, with a number of important confounds in previous research being identified. The latest research confirms the existence of a robust prior entry effect, identifying both perceptual and decisional components of the effect.