Four experiments examined how faces compete with physically salient stimuli for the control of attention in 4-, 6-, and 8-month-old infants (N = 117 total). Three computational models were used to quantify physical salience. We presented infants with visual search arrays containing a face and familiar object(s), such as shoes and flowers. Six- and 8-month-old infants looked first and longest at...

A salient event in the visual field tends to attract attention and the eyes. To account for the effects of salience on visual selection, models generally assume that the human visual system continuously holds information concerning the relative salience of objects in the visual field. Here we show that salience in fact drives vision only during the short time interval immediately following the ...

The salience of a contour depends upon several factors, including continuity, closure and curvature consistency. We analyze the statistics of curvature variation using a single image from Shimon Ullman’s [1] original work on contour salience. We develop a measure based on the arc length of a contour segment over which curvature variation remains within a constrained range. Locally, all contours...

The present study tested the Terror Management perspective on disgust by examining the effects of mortality salience on disgust sensitivity among 137 university students, 48 older adults, and 44 mortuary students preparing for a career in the funeral service industry. Participants were randomly assigned to a mortality salience, uncertainty salience, or television salience induction. Following a...

The axioms of expected utility and discounted theory have been tested extensively. In contrast, the social welfare functions only in a few questionnaire studies involving choices between hypothetical income distributions. controlled experiment with 100 subjects placed role planners, we test five fundamental properties to determine efficacy traditional choice models predicting planner allocation...

Perceptual salience may motivate phonological processes such as consonant place assimilation. This paper reports on an experiment designed to test the perceptual salience of consonant place of articulation by listeners who are native speakers of Korean and by listeners who are native speakers of American English. The results, when averaged across vowels and language, reveal dorsal and labial co...

In natural vision both stimulus features and cognitive/affective factors influence an observer's attention. However, the relationship between stimulus-driven ("bottom-up") and cognitive/affective ("top-down") factors remains controversial: Can affective salience counteract strong visual stimulus signals and shift attention allocation irrespective of bottom-up features? Is there any difference b...

B salience—the extent to which a brand visually stands out from its competitors—is vital in competing on the shelf, yet is not easy to achieve in practice. This study proposes a methodology to determine the competitive salience of brands, based on a model of visual search and eye-movement recordings collected during a brand search experiment. We estimate brand salience at the point of purchase,...