The concept of resources has been used in cognitive psychology to refer to computations specific to a given cognitive domain (e.g. orthographic code for words) and those general to many domains (arousal and attention). In this chapter we examine efforts to provide a picture of both kinds of resources with methods designed to explore the anatomy and circuitry of cognitive operations. We conclude that the two types of resources have separable if rather complex anatomical loci and that their common circuitry leads to interactions in which attention and arousal can influence the priority of the task specific cognitive operations. Many situations such as priming, mix the role of automatic activation of specific computations and attention to those same computations. We review some evidence from anatomical and circuit studies that indicate that the anatomy of priming relates closely to the computation involved in the task and suggest methods for separating automatic and attended influences on priming.
