Abstract: As an important form of instructional design, cueing can guide learner’s attention, organize and integrate information in multimedia learning. In this article, we reviewed researches about the cueing effect in multimedia learning environment. It was found that cueing do play an important role in attention guiding. It can direct learners to focus on specific information and ignore the irrelevant interference of information. Thus, cueing can help the learners to integrate the figure-text information and improve the learning performance. But, the current studies on cue’s function lack convincing evidence. As for the impact on learning effect, although most of the results of empirical studies are positive, the diversity and the complexity of the learning material make the conclusion still inconsistent. At present, we explained the cueing effect from two theoretical perspectives: cognitive load theory and perceptual theory. It has found that adding cues did not significantly reduce the learners’ perceived subjective cognitive load. And from the perceptual processing perspective, cueing could attract the learner’s attention and make the visual searching more easily. Future studies still need to focus on the following issues: (a) do learners perceive the cues as relevant for learning? (b) we need to pay more attention to the diversity of learning materials and the differences between different types of cues, (c) the impact of learners’ experiences, (d) how to keep the validity of cueing in the instructional design.

Key words: cueing, multimedia learning, attention guidance, cognitive load, integration