The article analyzes the works of many scientists concerning the problem of attention in psychological science and formulates the basic concepts. Despite the rich history of attention research, it seems that there are different approaches to understanding this phenomenon. The main difficulties in studying the problem of attention are related to the fact that the scope of these phenomena is not only wide, but also very diverse, all this leads researchers to different interpretations of the essence of attention. It turned out that each of the theories of attention has its own characteristics, they complement each other.