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Deep learning architectures are an extremely powerful tool for recognizing and classifying images. However, they require supervised learning and normally work on vectors of the size of image pixels and produce the best results when trained on millions of object images. To help mitigate these issues, we propose an end-to-end architecture that fuses bottom-up saliency and top-down attention with an object recognition module to focus on relevant data and learn important features that can later be fine-tuned for a specific task, employing only unsupervised learning. In addition, by utilizing a virtual fovea that focuses on relevant portions of the data, the training speed can be greatly improved. We test the performance of the proposed Gamma saliency technique on the Toronto and CAT 2000 databases, and the foveated vision in the large Street View House Numbers (SVHN) database. The results with foveated vision show that Gamma saliency performs at the same level as the best alternative algorithms while being computationally faster. The results in SVHN show that our unsupervised cognitive architecture is comparable to fully supervised methods and that saliency also improves CNN performance if desired. Finally, we develop and test a top-down attention mechanism based on the Gamma saliency applied to the top layer of CNNs to facilitate scene understanding in multi-object cluttered images. We show that the extra information from top-down saliency is capable of speeding up the extraction of digits in the cluttered multidigit MNIST data set, corroborating the important role of top down attention., Competing Interests: Declaration of Competing Interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)