The attention crisis in nursing education predates generative AI

Generative artificial intelligence [GenAI] is increasingly treated as a primary explanation for students' perceived difficulties with sustained attention in nursing education. The author contends that such a framing risks misdiagnosing a longerstanding educational concern. While GenAI raises legitimate issues related to misinformation, overreliance, academic integrity, privacy, and critical thinking, students' attentional difficulties should also be understood within the broader history of the attention economy, short-form media, and digitally saturated learning environments. Drawing on literature on sustained attention, cognitive effort, attention regulation, digital distraction, short-form media, and GenAI in healthcare education, the author highlights a chronological mismatch between the recent emergence of widely accessible GenAI tools and earlier shifts in digital environments that reward novelty, rapid attentional switching, and low-friction engagement. Rather than reducing the issue to shortened attention span, the author examines how digitally saturated learning environments reshape sustained attention, attention regulation, and tolerance for cognitive effort in nursing education. This reframing matters because nursing education depends on students' capacity to sustain attention during clinical reasoning, patient assessment, communication, documentation, simulation-based learning, and safe decision-making. GenAI may amplify or make visible pre-existing challenges, but restriction alone is unlikely to address the broader attentional conditions shaping students' learning. Thus, the author calls for attention-supportive pedagogy that scaffolds cognitive effort, makes reasoning visible, supports digital and AI literacy, and deliberately cultivates sustained attention, critical evaluation, and clinical judgment in nursing education. Drawing on literature on sustained attention, cognitive effort, attention regulation, digital distraction, short-form media, and GenAI in healthcare education, the author highlights a chronological mismatch between the recent emergence of widely accessible GenAI tools and earlier shifts in digital environments that reward novelty, rapid attentional switching, and lowfriction engagement. Rather than treating declining attention span as a fixed cognitive trait or uniform population-level decline, the paper focuses on difficulties with sustained attention and attention regulation in contemporary nursing education. This reframing matters because nursing education depends on students' capacity to sustain attention during clinical reasoning, patient assessment, communication, documentation, simulation-based learning, and safe decision-making. GenAI may amplify or make visible pre-existing challenges, but restriction alone is unlikely to address the broader attentional conditions shaping students' learning. The paper therefore calls for attention-supportive pedagogy that scaffolds cognitive effort, makes reasoning visible, supports digital and AI literacy, and deliberately cultivates sustained attention, critical evaluation, and clinical judgment in nursing education.