This will sound strange, perhaps, but long ago I noticed that we and probably other creatures have the tendency to attend to objects in the visual field, but also have the ability to attend away from them, not merely to treat the visual field as "peripheral" vision, but literally to attend from objects within the field itself, and to focus attention on the movement and features, including perhaps even Newtonian theory features, of the field itself, especially under conditions of movement.
Thus, was The General Theory "counter intuitive"? I doubt that. But difficult of course to articulate theoretically.
I had incorporated Gibson's book The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems tangentially into my thesis, mostly on Wittgenstein. Gibson had worked with aeronautical research on vision in flight.
This has to do with what was once called epistemology.
It would not surprise me if the first widespread awareness of attention to the visual field itself came with travel, as a passenger, either in an animal drawn or motor driven vehicle or train.
Then, much later, came moving pictures.
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