Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) introduced the concept of apperception, which refers to an act that is necessary for an individual to become conscious of a perceptual event. He noted that without apperception, information does not enter conscious awareness. Leibniz said, “Attention is a determination of the soul to know something in preference to other things”.
“Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi intellectu ipse.”
– “Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses, except the intellect itself.”