  It is almost universal to regard attention as the facility that permits an
agent, human or machine, to give priority processing resources to relevant
stimuli while ignoring the irrelevant. The reality of how this might manifest
itself throughout all the forms of perceptual and cognitive processes possessed
by humans, however, is not as clear. Here we examine this reality with a broad
perspective in order to highlight the myriad ways that attentional processes
impact both perception and cognition. The paper concludes by showing two real
world problems that exhibit sufficient complexity to illustrate the ways in
which attention and cognition connect. These then point to new avenues of
research that might illuminate the overall cognitive architecture of spatial
cognition.
