Salience

Whether an object captures our attention depends, in part, on its salience. Salience, in this regard, is partially defined as how or why one object stands out from the others in its environment or how different a stimulus is compared with its neighbors in the visual field being observed. This chapter discusses salience and its relationship to attention. From an evolutionary standpoint, attention to things that “jump out” may be the difference between surviving and not. However, in some cases, the salient process drives our attention to suboptimal choices in the environment. Some of these suboptimal choices are core behaviors associated with numerous psychiatric conditions. Although historically salience and attention have been viewed as distinct processes, when considering salience in the context of an integrated network model, it represents a necessary precondition to the allocation of attention. There appears to be a group of salience-based deficits in attentional functioning that occur in multiple disorders of mental health. Some salience-based disorders appear to be distinct from those found in ADHD. These deficits would appear to be potential targets for intervention in their own right and may be responsive to different treatment options than those currently in use for the attentional issues related to ADHD.