Salience (neuroscience)
Conversely, attention can also be guided by top-down, memory-dependent, or anticipatory mechanisms, such as when looking ahead of moving objects or sideways before crossing streets.
Humans and other animals have difficulty paying attention to more than one item simultaneously, so they are faced with the challenge of continuously integrating and prioritizing different bottom-up and top-down influences.
[13] The term is widely used in the study of perception and cognition to refer to any aspect of a stimulus that, for any of many reasons, stands out from the rest.
Salience bias is closely related to the availability heuristic in behavioral economics, based on the influence of information vividness and visibility, such as recency or frequency,[21] on judgements, for example:Accessibility and salience are closely related to availability, and they are important as well.
Timing counts too: more recent events have a greater impact on our behavior, and on our fears, than earlier ones.Humans have bounded rationality, which refers to their limited ability to be rational in decision making, due to a limited capacity to process information and cognitive ability.
Despite the effectiveness of heuristics in doing so, they are limited by systematic errors[21] that occur, often the result of influencing biases, such as salience.
Despite this support, salience bias is limited for various reasons, one example being its difficulty in quantifying, operationalizing, and universally defining.
[15] This limits salience bias as the confusion negates its importance as an individual term, and therefore the influence it has on tax related behavior.
Likewise, the APA definition of salience refers to motivational importance,[17] which is based on subjective judgement, adding to the difficulty.
The token is an individual in a group different to the other members in that social environment, like a female in an all-male workplace.
The distinctiveness of the individual in that environment “fosters a salience bias”[19] and hence predisposes those generalized judgements, positive or negative.
[26] These aberrant salience attributions have been associated with altered activities in the mesolimbic system, including the striatum, the amygdala, the hippocampus, the parahippocampal gyrus.,[27] the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula.
[28] Dopamine mediates the conversion of the neural representation of an external stimulus from a neutral bit of information into an attractive or aversive entity, i.e. a salient event.
[29] Symptoms of schizophrenia may arise out of 'the aberrant assignment of salience to external objects and internal representations', and antipsychotic medications reduce positive symptoms by attenuating aberrant motivational salience via blockade of the dopamine D2 receptors (Kapur, 2003).
In the domain of psychology, efforts have been made in modeling the mechanism of human attention, including the learning of prioritizing the different bottom-up and top-down influences.
[33][35] Some recent work attempts to overcome these issues at the expense of saliency detection quality under some conditions.
[37] Other work suggests that saliency and associated speed-accuracy phenomena may be a fundamental mechanisms determined during recognition through gradient descent, needing not be spatial in nature.
