ABSTRACT
This chapter describes how interest affects learning, and interest's association with attention and the brain's reward circuitry. It explains that developing an interest may not require external incentives because it is inherently rewarding to seek or search for information relating to the content of interest. The chapter explores that the presence of interest enables learners to make connections to the learning that they are doing, which is rewarding and impacts conceptual understanding. The strong association that exists between interest and attention is one of the reasons that interest is considered to have an important facilitating effect on learning. Historically, researchers maintained that attention and factors that contribute to attention make a critical contribution to the effect that interest has on human performance and learning. Developments in neuroscience provide confirmation of the association between attention and interest in learning. The chapter draws on relevant research findings from the fields of psychology and neuroscience to describe how attention is linked to interest.
