Agents that sense the world and generate knowledge accessible to processes that reason are said to perceive the world. Perception drives a continuum of behaviors that extend from the simplicity of a thermostat which simply measures the temperature to the assumption used by some agents that objects containing all relevant information about things in the world get inserted into the agent's knowledge.
In this later case, the amount of perceptional information at any one time may be overwhelm the agent's processing abilities. One way to circumvent this problem in real domains is to include a system for focusing attention on relevant percepts. In this case, the architecture makes a deliberate decision to concentrate on particular environmental percepts and must be forced (perhaps by a high priority stimulus) to move its attention elsewhere.
In addition to attentional mechanisms, perception may also be corrupted by faulty transducers or some other problem with accurately sensing the environment. In some cases, the architectures are then supplied with the ability to support and recover from inaccurate sensing.
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