 The idea that attending to a location is more basic than attending to a shape might tempt one to think that attending on the basis of location is absolutely basic, so that attention is always and only allocated on the basis of location. If that were right then a theory of the spatial allocation of attention—a theory about the moving and focusing of an ‘attentional spotlight’—would be a large and central component in an account of how attention works. This would be good news for those who want to give a single unified theory of attention, and it would be good news for the scientific project of explaining attention more generally, since attention’s spotlight-like behaviours are some of its best understood aspects (see Logan, 1996).