This paper considers ways in which a person can cue and constrain an artificial agent's attention to salient features. In one experiment, a person uses gestures to direct an otherwise autonomous robot hand through a known task. Each gesture instantiates the key spatial and intentional features for the task at that moment in time. In a second hypothetical task, a person uses speech and gesture to assist an “intelligent room≓ in learning to recognize the objects in its environment. Both experiments use a system of dynamic reference, termed deictic, to bind the robot's perception and action to salient task variables.