Rhythmic temporal structure is a recurring theme in the field of cognitive neuroscience. It spans physiology as well as behavioral performance and provides interesting brain behavior links. In my talk I will describe work focusing on one aspect of rhythmic cognition: Attentional sampling. When subjects monitor a single spatial location, target detection depends on the pre-target phase of an 8Hz brain rhythm. When multiple locations are monitored, performance decrements suggest a division of the 8Hz rhythm over the number of locations. This suggests that different locations are sequentially sampled. In my talk I will survey evidence for attentional sampling in behavior and in non-invasive physiology. Together with published work, I will present new findings assess whether sampling may be a domain-general principle in the architecture of perception and attention.