Walter R. Miles’ Pursuitmeter, as pictured in the inventor’s 1921 article for the Journal of Experimental Psychology. Here we see the “front view of the stimulus wattmeter and the regulator rheostat. By the manipulation of the rheostat a subject endeavors constantly to keep the wattmeter needle on the white zero line as illustrated”

Featured on PDR in the essay Cybernetic Attention: All Watched over by Machines We Learned to Watch

Before the attention economy consumed our lives, “pursuit tests” devised by the US military coupled man to machine with the aim of assessing focus under pressure. D. Graham Burnett explores these devices for evaluating aviators, finding a pre-history of the laboratory research that has relentlessly worked to slice and dice the attentional powers of human beings.