 Attention’s involvement in voluntary action is a lot harder to study in a controlled experiment than its involvement in perception. The theories of attention emerging from experimental psychology have, as a result, focused almost exclusively on attention’s perceptual instances. In this respect they contrast with theories that were developed in the period before psychology and philosophy split, in which the action-involving aspects of attention were much more prominent. William James, for example, suggests in the Principles of Psychology that ‘volition is nothing but attention’ (James, 1890 p. 424), and at one time (in what might be read as an anticipation of the competition-based theories discussed above, in  §2.6)  he proposed that “Attention, belief, affirmation, and motor volition, are […] four names for an identical process, incidental to the conflict of ideas alone, the survival of one in spite of the opposition of the others.” (1880).