Relevance and Salience During Attention Task

When finding a target item during visual search (looking for a pencil), a salient item can capture attention (your phone flashing from a message). Typical attention studies only examine salient items when shown as distractor during search, to ensure any attention to the items are driven by salience alone. However, the impact of salience may interact with the relevance of the item for the search task (e.g. how likely the salient item is to be the target). Here, the researchers investigate these interactions in a basic science study when participants perform an easy task or a difficult search task.