When looking for something, high salience may help or interfere in equal measure

What is it about?

Every time our eyes move, the resulting movement reflects an internal selection process that takes into consideration two things: what stands out in the current field of view, and what, if anything, we are looking for. This study investigates how these two factors interact. The challenge is that the selection process unfolds very rapidly, within a few tens of milliseconds. We used a novel task design with which salience- and goal-driven contributions can be resolved with high temporal precision.

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Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Why is it important?

We learned three things: (1) A salient object always captures attention, but does so very briefly. (2) This salience signal may help or hinder the search for a visual target in equal measures. (3) Whether salience helps or hinders depends on whether it is aligned or misaligned with current goals. A key consequence of all this is that looking away from a salient target is very much the same as looking toward an inconspicuous one; the same cognitive mechanisms are enlisted in both cases. The broader lesson is that the problem of combining external (i.e., sensory) and internal information (i.e., goals) to guide motor actions is a fundamental one, and it likely summons similar mechanisms during behaviors that vary widely in their complexity and specifics.

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