Research Article Effects of Salience Are Short-Lived

ABSTRACT—A salient event in the visual field tends to at-tract attention and the eyes. To account for the effects of salience on visual selection, models generally assume that the human visual system continuously holds information concerning the relative salience of objects in the visual field. Here we show that salience in fact drives vision only during the short time interval immediately following the onset of a visual scene. In a saccadic target-selection task, human performance in making an eye movement to the most salient element in a display was accurate when re-sponse latencies were short, but was at chance when re-sponse latencies were long. In a manual discrimination task, performance in making a judgment of salience was more accurate with brief than with long display dura-tions. These results suggest that salience is represented in the visual system only briefly after a visual image enters the brain. A salient object tends to attract attention and often initiates a subsequent eye movement. This finding has been replicated often and is well established (Itti & Koch, 2001; Theeuwes, Kramer, Hahn, & Irwin, 1998). It demonstrates that visual se-lection is very much influenced by the stimulus properties in the visual field. Current computational, functional, and neuro-physiological models of visual selection account for stimulus-driven effects by assuming that the brain possesses a salience map, a topographical representation of the relative distinctive