Visual salience is the visual system’s assessment of the relative importance, or ‘behavioral relevance’, of regions of the scene.  It is a bottom-up process that is distinct from, but interacts with, top-down visual attention.  This line of research explores methods - with infants and with an eye toward formalizing developmental studies - for calibrating salience.  In this manner, two objects, say a red circle and a large circle can be calibrated to be ‘iso-salient’ from a baseline small gray circle.  Such ‘salience mappings’ are useful for creating stimuli for studies, for instance, in Visual Working Memory.

Related publications:

papers

Kaldy, Z., Blaser, E., & Leslie, A., (2006). A new method for calibrating perceptual salience across dimensions in infants: the case of color vs. luminance.  Developmental Science, 9:5, 482–489

Blaser, E., Sperling, G., & Lu, Z-L. (1999). Measuring the amplification of attention.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 96, 11681-11686.

see also:

Snowden, R. (2000) In clear and vivid form?  [Discussion of Blaser, Sperling, & Lu (1999)]. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 40.

presentations

Kaldy, Z., Blaser, E., & Kibbe, M. (2006). Detection vs. Salience of color and motion- defined stimuli in 6-month-old infants. The Annual Meeting of the Vision Sciences Society (VSS), Sarasota, FL

Kaldy, Z., Blaser, E., Kibbe, M., & Pomplun, M. (2005). What drives visual salience in young infants? The Annual Meeting of the Vision Sciences Society (VSS), Sarasota, FL

Blaser, E., Kaldy, Z., Eddy, K., & Pomplun, M. (2005). Determining salience for complex objects. The Annual Meeting of the Vision Sciences Society (VSS), Sarasota, FL

Kaldy, Z. & Blaser, E. (2005). Visual salience relations reflect perceptual development in 5- and 6-month-old infants. The Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), Atlanta, GA

Kaldy, Z., & Blaser, E. (2004). Iso-salient color and luminance information in visual working memory. European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), Budapest, Hungary

Kaldy, Z., Blaser, E., & Leslie, A. (2004). Iso-salient color and luminance information in object identification. International Conference on Infancy Studies (ICIS), Chicago, IL