ABSTRACT
Attention is notoriously hard to define, but is essential for learning to occur. People attentional resources are limited and must be directed towards the most important information. In fact, many researchers are indeed unsure about the nature of attention – though they have tried to capture and define this elusive concept. Nevertheless, most cognitive psychologists do agree that attention is an important concept to teach their students. The most commonly accepted definition of attention among cognitive psychologists is focus on a specific stimulus, or the ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations. The amount of information requiring our attention is known in the literature as "cognitive load," and an overabundance of it is known as "cognitive overload". Two theories of cognitive load have dominated the field: one known simply as Load Theory and the other as Cognitive Load Theory. The Processing Speed Theory involves describing people attentional resources in terms of how quickly the authors can process information.
