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How visual salience wins the battle for awareness

Nature Neuroscience volume 8, pages 975–977 (2005)Cite this article

Voluntarily paying attention to one object in a crowded scene enhances perception of that object and increases the activity of neurons representing it. Attention can also be drawn involuntarily by salient objects—for example, by the sudden onset of a bright stimulus. A study now shows how this involuntary type of attention may mediate competition between representations in human visual cortex.

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Figure 1: The visual system is organized hierarchically; receptive field size and complexity increase from V1 to V4 to inferotemporal (IT) cortex.

Ann Thomson

Figure 2: Cartoon of the context effects described by Beck and Kastner4.

Ann Thomson

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  1. Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 N. Charles St., Baltimore, 21218, Maryland, USA

    Steven Yantis

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Yantis, S. How visual salience wins the battle for awareness. Nat Neurosci 8, 975–977 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn0805-975

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