A salience-weighting theory of attention

The salience-weighting theory of attention extends the established dimension-weighting account in depth and in breadth towards a general theory of attention. Depth is gained by specifying all relevant cognitive mechanisms verbally and mathematically. Breadth is gained by incorporating spatial weighting and relating it to nonsearch tasks and nonvisual stimuli. Our theory uses a common set of core principles to explain the allocation(s) of focal attention in all these domains. We specify in detail the preattentive cognitive mechanisms informing attention allocations, starting from a preliminary representation of the scene up to the decision where to attend next. Furthermore, we speculate how individuals (mostly passively) adapt these mechanisms to their goals and the regularities in their environment. Although based on much previous theorizing and empirical work (much more than can be reviewed here), this theory currently still is highly speculative, and many of its assumptions and predictions still need to be adapted and tested. Despite the risk (or certainty) of being proven wrong in some respects, we specify the underlying mechanisms to a degree that they can be translated into quantitative models and so that many specific and falsifiable novel predictions can be derived from the theory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).