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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 6, 2026

Measuring Attention and Visual Processing Speed by Model-based Analysis of Temporal-order Judgments

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Published on: January 23, 2017

The effect of visual salience on memory-based choices.

Arezoo Pooresmaeili¹, Dominik R Bach, Raymond J Dolan

¹Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany;

Journal of Neurophysiology

|November 8, 2013

Summary

Visual salience influences memory decisions. Highly salient stimuli are more likely to be perceived as matches due to limited cognitive resources during comparison, impacting working memory tasks.

Keywords:

bottom-up attention choice memory saliency

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience
Perception

Background:

Visual selective attention is key for working memory and decision-making.
Prior research focused on attention during memory encoding, not later decision stages.
The impact of stimulus salience on post-encoding memory decisions is less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate how manipulating bottom-up attention via stimulus visual salience affects memory-based decisions.
To determine if visual salience influences the comparison stage of working memory tasks.

Main Methods:

Two experiments were conducted involving memory-based same/different judgments.
Visual salience of test stimuli was manipulated by varying task-irrelevant feature contrast.
Participants identified if a test stimulus matched a memorized sample.

Main Results:

Participants were more likely to identify visually salient items as matches when seeking a match.
Conversely, salient items were less likely to be identified as matches when seeking a non-match.
This suggests salient stimuli bias same/different judgments.

Conclusions:

Visual salience can bias memory-based decisions, particularly in same/different tasks.
Findings suggest capacity limitations at the comparison stage, where salient items may consume more resources.
This premature parsing of salient items as matches impacts perceptual decision-making accuracy.