salience

Salience is the quality by which something stands out relative to its surroundings, drawing attention or signaling importance within a given context. In cognitive science and psychology, salience refers to an attribute of stimuli that makes them more likely to be noticed, processed, or remembered than other inputs.

Salience can be perceptual, arising from physical properties such as brightness, color, contrast, motion, or novelty, or semantic and motivational, arising from relevance to goals, prior knowledge, or emotional value. Bottom-up salience is stimulus-driven, while top-down salience is goal-directed and influenced by expectations and tasks.

Neuroscience: The brain's salience network, including the anterior insula and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, is involved in detecting salient events and reorienting attention. This network interacts with attention and control networks to prioritize processing and switch task sets as needed.

Applications: In psychology and marketing, salience guides perception and behavior; in user interface design, salient cues help users notice important features. In machine learning and computer vision, saliency maps indicate which input regions most influence a model's decision.

Measurement and limitations: Salience is highly context-dependent and can be difficult to quantify; researchers use eye-tracking, reaction times, and neuroimaging to infer salience, and different models distinguish bottom-up and top-down contributions.