A humanoid robot is always fiooded by sensed information when sensing the environment, and it usually needs significant time to compute and process the sensed information. In this paper, a selective attention-based contextual perception approach was proposed for humanoid robots to sense the environment with high efficiency. First, the connotation of attention window (AW) is extended to make a more general and abstract definition of AW, and its four kinds of operations and state transformations are also discussed. Second, the attention control policies are described, which integrate intension- guided perceptual objects selection and distractor inhibition, and can deal with emergent issues. Distractor inhibition is used to filter unrelated information. Last, attention policies are viewed as the robot’s perceptual modes, which can control and adjust the perception efficiency. The experimental results show that the presented approach can promote the perceptual efficiency significantly, and the perceptual cost can be effectively controlled through adopting different attention policies. A humanoid robot is always fiooded by sensed information when sensing the environment, and it usually needs significant time to compute and process the sensed information. In this paper, a selective attention-based contextual perception perception was was for humanoid robots to sense the environment with second, the attention control policies are described, which integrate intension- guided perceptual objects selection and distractor inhibition, and can deal with emergent issues. Distractor inhibition is used to filter unrelated information. Last, attention policies are viewed as the robot’s perceptual modes, which can control and adjust the perception efficiency. show that the presented approach can promote the perceptual efficiency significantly, a nd the perceptual cost can be effectively controlled through adopting different attention policies.