Are activations in the salience map short-lived?
” Perception 35 ECVP Abstract Supplement Are activations in the salience map short-lived? M Donk The salience of an object is typically determined by its local feature contrast relative to the surrounding objects. Most models of visual search assume that salience is represented in our visual system in some sort of location-based salience map. Competition among neurons in this map yields a single winning location that corresponds to the next attended location. If the location is inhibited, the system automatically shifts to the next most salient location and so forth. Implicitly, models adhering to this idea assume that the visual system is able to continuously hold information about the relative salience of objects in the visual field. In the present study we manipulated the relative salience of individual elements in homogenous displays. Participants had to indicate the location of the most salient element. The results demonstrated that, even though participants are very good at this
