This volume constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Attention in Cognitive Systems, WAPCV 2008, held in Fira, Santorini, Greece in May 2008 as an associated event of the 6th International Conference on Computer Vision Systems (ICVS 2008). The 13 revised full papers presented together with with 9 posters, have been carefully selected from 34 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on attention in scene exploration, contextueal cueing and saliency, spatiotemporal saliency, attentional networks as well as attentional modelling.