This review intends to provide an overview of the state of the art in the modelling and implementation of automatic attentional mechanisms for socially interactive robots. Humans assess and exhibit intentionality by resorting to multisensory processes that are deeply rooted within low-level automatic attention-related mechanisms of the brain. For robots to engage with humans properly, they should also be equipped with similar capabilities. Joint attention, the precursor of many fundamental types of social interactions, has been an important focus of research in the past decade and a half, therefore providing the perfect backdrop for assessing the current status of stateof-the-art automatic attentional-based solutions. Consequently, we propose to review the influence of these mechanisms in the context of social interaction in cutting-edge research work on joint attention. This will be achieved by summarising the contributions already made in these matters in robotic cognitive systems research, by identifying the main scientific issues to be addressed by these contributions and analysing how successful they have been in this respect, and by consequently drawing conclusions that may suggest a roadmap for future successful research efforts.Index Terms-automatic attentional mechanisms, multisensory active perception, socially interactive robots, joint attention, bottom-up influences, top-down influences, probabilistic, hierarchical/modular architecture This is the author's version of an article that has been published in this journal. Changes were made to this version by the publisher prior to publication.The final version of record is available at http://dx.