Attention and cognition are interrelated, and they have a significant effect on each other. Whilst attention is perceived as the ability to focus on desired information or activities for a significant amount of time, cognition refers to thought processes that occur in the brain which usually impact learning. Thus, one can see that the ability to maintain attention on a subject is needed in order the thought processes necessary for learning to occur. When attention problems are present, they can have a detrimental effect on cognition and learning.
Broadbent (1954, cited in Naish, 2015) was one of the first researchers to investigate auditory attention using dichotic listening experiments. In a dichotic listening task participants were tested on how they responded to different messages on left and right ear that were being played simultaneously. Each participant should try to attend to one ear. When participants were asked to recall the message in the unattended ear, they reported great difficulty and almost nothing of the message could be recalled although in some variations of experiments they could recall if the voice was male or female. Attempting to explain the findings of dichotic listening experiments (1954, as cited in Naish, 2015) proposed that a bottleneck exist within the intentional system, consequently this is produced when large amounts of information enters the brain. Filtration of that information occurs based on its relevance before it is processed in the conscious part of the brain. Furthermore according to this model the brain has a certain criteria for filtering information and this is based on the physical properties of the sensory information, for instance voice (who is speaking), location (which ear is the information being spoken in). According to Broadbent the meaning of the messages is not taken into account by the filter until after the message has been selected.