The ASMO Cognitive Architecture has been developed to support key capabilities: attention, awareness and self-modification. In this paper we describe the underlying attention model in ASMO. The ASMO Cognitive Architecture is inspired by a biological attention theory, and offers a mechanism for directing and creating behaviours, beliefs, anticipation, discovery, expectations and changes in a complex system. Thus, our attention based architecture provides an elegant solution to the problem of behaviour development and behaviour selection particularly when the behaviours are mutually incompatible.