Domain Independent Perception in the LIDA Cognitive Software Agent
       Perception, defined as the process of sensing, recognizing, categorizing and understanding the world around us, is a critical process in any cognitive system. Any autonomous agent, be it natural or artificial, which strives to behave intelligently in all but the simplest environments, must attain a robust level of perception. Such perception allows for the proper recognition of the agent's surroundings and the ability to assimilate, process and act upon sensory input from those surroundings. This paper will present an abstract software model representing a perceptual system that can be embedded in, and tailored for, virtually any environment for which sensory data can be digitally represented in a computer-based software system. The integration of this perceptual system into the existing LIDA cognitive software agent is used as the context for describing this model of perception as a crucial component of a comprehensive model of cognition.