 One can easily see why the spotlight metaphor has been appealing. If we are presented with an array of differently coloured shapes, appearing and disappearing in various places, then there will be any number of attention-demanding tasks that we might perform regarding that array. Some tasks might require us to attend to whatever is going on at the top of the screen, others might require us to attend to all the red shapes, or to all the triangles, or to something else. Some of these ways of attending seem to be more basic than others. It seems, for example, that attending to things in the top part of the screen might be a primitive task, whereas attending to the triangles could not be primitive in the same way: we cannot simply attend to the triangles. If we want to attend to the triangles, we need first to work out where the triangles are. If, on the other hand, we want to attend to the things in the top part of the screen we do not need to work out whether they are triangles. It is therefore plausible that when we attend to the triangles we do so by attending to their locations. In this sense attending on the basis of location seems to be more basic than attending on the basis of shape.