ABSTRACT
Attention is integral to skill. Learning new material or skills requires attending to the right information-and ignoring wrong or irrelevant informationand an essential part of many skills is learning to allocate attention appropriately to the right information at the right time or to share attention across tasks or sources of information. At the same time, the role of attention might change as skill is acquired and some components are automatized. For example, most of us are so practiced at the task of driving that we are not aware of steering, braking, or changing gears as necessary-or, at times, even of the route that we are driving-while attending to both traffic and road conditions (but not billboards or noise coming from the backseat). The role of attention in skill acquisition and skilled performance is so important that no account of skill can be complete without a consideration of attention processes. In this chapter, we focus on the role of attention in the development of skill and on the development of attentional skill itself.
