Glossary
Salience
What is salience?
Salience is how much something stands out in its surroundings. A bright object may be hard to miss against a dull background and much less noticeable in a brightly colored scene.
Itti and Koch's review describes how visual salience depends on surrounding features and how understanding a scene also guides attention.
What makes a stimulus salient?
Physical contrast matters: a feature can stand out because of its color, brightness, or orientation relative to nearby features. Attention also depends on the task and what the person is looking for. Emotional relevance can matter too; research on emotional attention examines how emotionally meaningful information affects what receives priority.
Salience examples in design and communication
A brightly colored instruction may stand out on an otherwise plain form. That is useful only if noticing the instruction helps the person complete the task. Salience describes prominence; salience bias concerns giving information extra weight because it is prominent.
Why it matters
Making something noticeable can help it get attention. Getting noticed, being remembered, and being chosen are different results, though. Check which one your design needs to achieve.
For an example of prominence receiving extra weight in a judgment, see salience bias.