 The year prior to Perception and Communication’s publication had seen B.F. Skinner’s attempt, in Verbal Behaviour (1957), to apply a behaviourist explanatory approach to distinctively human aspects of cognition. Skinner’s project in that book failed, and Noam Chomsky’s famous 1959 review of the book made its failure conspicuous. Chomsky’s own work in Syntactic Structures (1957) went some way towards establishing the new cognitive paradigm for psychology by showing how internal processing could be theorized by describing transformations on representations in abstraction from the question of how those representations were realized. Donald Broadbent’s distinctive contribution to the overthrow of behaviourism was to show how the move from behavioural data to the postulation of a particular cognitive architecture could be disciplined by the then-new strategy of importing into psychology the intellectual resources used in thinking about information technology. The year in which Broadbent’s book was published was an important year for the development of such technologies, being the year in which (inter alia) the integrated circuit chip was invented (see Mole, 2012). It was also the year in which Subscriber Trunk Dialling was introduced to UK telephone exchanges. The technology of the telephone exchange was what most naturally suggested itself as a metaphor for attention at the time when Broadbent was writing.