It is elicited not only by novel stimuli, but also other salient, attention-getting stimuli such as the mother's face (de Haan, 2007).
Performance in the same-location condition might be impaired by inhibition of return (IOR; Posner & Cohen, 1984), a response attenuation that develops rapidly at the screen location of a salient, attention-grabbing cue (Klein, 2000; Pertzov, Zohary, & Avidan, 2010).
Subjects responded comparatively weakly to congruent stimuli despite these sequences being more salient and attention-grabbing in a number of ways.
More specifically, to what extent does a rewarded salient distractor capture attention after endogenous attention has been deployed?
Looming signals are salient and more attention-grabbing (exogenous attention) than other types of signals including the receding ones that were used here [39], [40].
The details — Dutch AIDS researchers on their way to an international conference; small Palestinian boys kicking a soccer ball on the beach — make the story salient, grab our attention, and, sometimes, distort our perspective.
Overall, the data are consistent with the saliency hypothesis [16], which postulates that an alteration in an individual's body must be highly salient to draw attention to the mirror image.
In addition to selecting features that are physically conspicuous and salient [3], the attention circuits support visual sampling of the environment by interacting with motivational and emotional systems [4], [5], [6], [7].
Our results demonstrated that 1) in the 1-sec pre-stimulus interval, frontal alpha (8 12 Hz) activity was higher on trials where the salient distractor captured attention and the first saccade (bottom-up win); and 2) there was a transient pre-saccadic increase in posterior-parietal alpha (7 8 Hz) activity on trials where the first saccade went to the target (top-down win).
In any case, and from an evolutionary point of view, the fact that emotional, biologically salient distractors capture attention also during highly demanding tasks seems a reasonable strategy.
On the contrary, when there is no value-driven attentional set, even relatively weak salient stimuli will capture attention.
