 The discovery that attention can preferentially modulate the processing of stimuli on account of their colours, shapes, and meanings does not prevent us from maintaining that the location of a stimulus has a special role to play in the process by which attention is allocated to it. More than one line of research in psychology has sought to identify some one representation in the brain in which items are encoded in a way that determines the extent to which attention will be allocated to them. In the longest established of these lines of research—beginning with the work of Koch and Ullman (1985)—this representation has been taken to be a map, in some quite literal sense of ‘map’: the representation is taken to be one in which every location in some region is represented, and the representation of these locations is taken to be in some format that immediately encodes the spatial relations between them. Every object that is represented is taken to be represented as being at some location, and the properties assigned to these located objects are taken to determine the likelihood that attention will be paid to the location that the objects occupy. According to the theory that postulates these ‘salience maps’, location does play a unique role in determining the way in which attention is allocated, despite the fact that other properties also contribute to that allocation.