Abstract Directing robot attention to recognise activities and to anticipate events like goal-directed actions is a crucial skill for human-robot interaction. Unfortunately, issues like intrinsic time constraints, the spatially distributed nature of the entailed information sources, and the existence of a multitude of unobservable states affecting the system, like latent intentions, have long rendered achievement of such skills a rather elusive goal. The problem tests the limits of current attention control systems. It requires an integrated solution for tracking, exploration and recognition, which traditionally have been seen as separate problems in active vision. We propose a probabilistic generative framework based on information gain maximisation and a mixture of Kalman Filters that uses predictions in both recognition and attention-control. This framework can ef?ciently use the observations of one element in a dynamic environment to provide information on other elements, and consequently enables guided exploration. Interestingly, the sensors control policy, directly derived from ?rst principles, represents the intuitive trade-off between ?nding the most discriminative clues and maintaining overall awareness. Experiments on a simulated humanoid robot observing a human executing goal-oriented actions demonstrated improvement on recognition time and precision over baseline systems.