Salience

Salience is the quality of standing out from the surroundings—due to emotional, motivational, cognitive, or physical factors (intensity, clarity, size). Saliency detection is used to study perception and cognition, typically in the context of the visual system (red dot amid blue dots), though other sensory systems have salient traits. Salient stimuli drive attentional selection from bottom-up (memory – free and reactive) or from top-down (memory – dependent and anticipatory — looking sideways before crossing street). It’s challenging (and exhausting) to continuously integrate/prioritize different bottom-up/top-down or internal/external influences. Salience can be caused by sensory contrast (difference between two colors), emotional resonance (something striking), or cognitive ease (simple to process). It can be key to survival (noticing a growling dog) but can distract from goals and lead to poor decisions (plane crash news keeps us from flying). Also see Self-Salience