title: Saliency changes appearance.
abstract: Numerous studies have suggested that the deployment of attention is linked to saliency. In contrast, very little is known about how salient objects are perceived. To probe the perception of salient elements, observers compared two horizontally aligned stimuli in an array of eight elements. One of them was salient because of its orientation or direction of motion. We observed that the perceived luminance contrast or color saturation of the salient element increased: the salient stimulus looked even more salient. We explored the possibility that changes in appearance were caused by attention. We chose an event-related potential indexing attentional selection, the N2pc, to answer this question. The absence of an N2pc to the salient object provides preliminary evidence against involuntary attentional capture by the salient element. We suggest that signals from a master saliency map flow back into individual feature maps. These signals boost the perceived feature contrast of salient objects, even on perceptual dimensions different from the one that initially defined saliency.
authors.affiliation: Section de Psychologie, Faculté de Psychologie et des Sciences de l'Éducation, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland. dirk.kerzel@unige.ch
authors.forename: Dirk
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Kerzel
authors.forename: Josef
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Schönhammer
authors.forename: Nicolas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Burra
authors.forename: Sabine
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Born
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Souto
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003116:Color; D003118:Color Perception; D003198:Computer Simulation; D006801:Humans; D008027:Light; D009038:Motion; D009039:Motion Perception; D015588:Observer Variation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods*; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000379:methods; D013028:Space Perception; D014785:Vision, Ocular