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There is growing evidence that pitch accents as well as prosodic boundaries can affect syntactic attachment. But is this an effect of their perceptual salience (the Salience Hypothesis), or is it because accents mark the position of focus (the Focus Attraction Hypothesis)? A pair of auditory comprehension experiments shows that focus position, as indicated by preceding wh-questions instead of by pitch accents, affects attachment by drawing the ambiguous phrase to the focus. This supports the Focus Attraction Hypothesis (or a pragmatic version of salience) for both these results and previous results of accents on attachment. These experiments show that information structure, as indicated with prosody or other means, influences sentence interpretation, and suggests a view on which modifiers are drawn to the most important information in a sentence.

Previous studies have argued that two morphophonological properties–perceptual salience and cue reliability–can explain cross-linguistic differences in early comprehension of verbal agreement. Children acquiring a language with high salience and reliability markers (French) showed much earlier comprehension than children acquiring markers with lower salience and reliability (English and Spanish; Legendre et al., 2014). Here we tested this hypothesis further by investigating early comprehension in Greek, where markers have high salience and reliability (compared to Spanish and English) predicting early comprehension, as in French. We investigated two and three-year-old Greek-speaking children’s ability to distinguish third person singular and plural agreement in a picture-selection task. We also examined the frequency of these morphemes in child-directed speech to address input effects. Results showed that three-year-olds are sensitive to both singular and plural agreement, earlier than children acquiring English and Spanish, but later than French, and despite singular agreement being more frequent than plural agreement in the child corpus. These findings provide further support for the role of salience and reliability during early acquisition, while highlighting a potential effect of morpheme position.

The purpose of the present study was to contribute to current documented evidence of the challenges imposed by inflectional morphology in second language acquisition. We conducted two speeded acceptability judgment tasks with Brazilian Portuguese-English bilinguals with different linguistic profiles. We analyzed their behavior with respect to grammatical and ungrammatical sentences in English involving inflectional morphology. Our results suggested that the bilingual speakers differed from English native speakers only with respect to the sentences with missing inflectional morphemes regardless of proficiency level and immersion status. We understand these findings as an indication that difficulty with functional morphology involves perceptual salience and possibly learned attention to linguistic cues.

This study examined how listeners disambiguate an auditory scene comprising multiple competing unknown sources and determine a salient source. Experiment 1 replicated findings from McDermott, Wrobleski, and Oxenham. [(2011). Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 108(3), 1188-1193] using a multivariate Gaussian model to generate mixtures of two novel sounds. The results showed that listeners were unable to identify either sound in the mixture despite repeated exposure unless one sound was repeated several times while being mixed with a different distractor each time. The results support the idea that repetition provides a basis for segregating a single source from competing novel sounds. In subsequent experiments, the previous identification task was extended to a recognition task and the results were modeled. To confirm the repetition benefit, experiment 2 asked listeners to recognize a temporal ramp in either a repeating sound or non-repeating sounds. The results showed that perceptual salience of the repeating sound allowed robust recognition of its temporal ramp, whereas similar features were ignored in the non-repeating sounds. The response from two neural models of learning, generalized Hebbian learning and anti-Hebbian learning, were compared with the human listener results from experiment 2. The Hebbian network showed a similar response pattern as for the listener results, whereas the opposite pattern was observed for the anti-Hebbian output.

The foci of visual attention were modeled as a function of perceptual salience, adult fixation locations, and attentional control mechanisms (measured in separate tasks) in infants (N = 45, 3- to 15-month-olds) as they viewed static real-world scenes. After controlling for the center bias, the results showed that low-level perceptual salience predicts where infants look. In addition, high-level factors also played a role: Infants fixated parts of the scenes frequently fixated by adults and this effect was stronger for older than younger infants. In line with this finding, infant fixation durations were longer on regions more frequently fixated by adults, implying longer time taken to process the available information. Fixation durations decreased with age, and this decline interacted with orienting skills such that fixation durations decreased faster with age for infants with high orienting skills, relative to infants with low orienting skills. There was a further interaction between fixation durations and selective attention abilities: Infants with low selective attention skills showed a decrease in fixation durations with age, whereas infants with higher selective attention skills showed a slight increase in fixation durations with age. These findings imply that infants' visual processing of static real-world stimuli develops in accord with attentional control.

Magnitude effects (e.g., heavier or faster is longer) and valence effects (e.g., negative > positive) are widely observed in time perception studies, but not well understood. In four experiments, we explored how different action contexts (e.g., tasting, lifting) affected magnitude and valence effects. In two experiments a valence effect occurred: Tasting a sweet food (watermelon) led to temporal underestimations relative to a neutral stimulus, while sour and bitter foods led to overestimations. However, when the same foods were presented in a lifting context a magnitude effect occurred: Reproduced times for the heavier food (watermelon) were overestimated relative to the lighter foods. In a fourth experiment magnitude and valence interacted: Imagining tasting increasing amounts of lemon or carrying increasing loads of lemon, both negative, yielded magnitude effects; however, imagining carrying lemons to feed malnourished people, which was positive, did not. Results present challenges for several common theoretical approaches (e.g., arousal, attention, common magnitude theory) but provide support for affordance theory and perceptual salience theory. Timing depends on action relevance and is jointly shaped by valence and magnitude.

The current study investigated the potential facilitative or inhibiting effects of orthography on the lexical encoding of palatalized consonants in L2 Russian. We hypothesized that learners with stable knowledge of orthographic and metalinguistic representations of palatalized consonants would display more accurate lexical encoding of the plain/palatalized contrast. The participants of the study were 40 American learners of Russian. Ten Russian native speakers served as a control group. The materials of the study comprised 20 real words, familiar to the participants, with target coronal consonants alternating in word-final and intervocalic positions. The participants performed three tasks: written picture naming, metalinguistic, and auditory word–picture matching. Results showed that learners were not entirely familiar with the grapheme–phoneme correspondences in L2 Russian. Even though they spelled almost all of these familiar Russian words accurately, they were able to identify the plain/palatalized status of the target consonants in these words with about 80% accuracy on a metalinguistic task. The effect of orthography on the lexical encoding was found to be dependent on the syllable position of the target consonants. In intervocalic position, learners erroneously relied on vowels following the target consonants rather than the consonants themselves to encode words with plain/palatalized consonants. In word-final position, although learners possessed the orthographic and metalinguistic knowledge of the difference in the palatalization status of the target consonants—and hence had established some aspects of the lexical representations for the words—those representations appeared to lack in phonological granularity and detail, perhaps due to the lack of perceptual salience.

"It is suggested that an analysis of the meaning of posture verbs in Russian should take into account the perceptual-cognitive factors in the observer’s interactions with the world of material objects. Some peculiarities in the conceptualization of spatial entities are pointed out; these are reflected in a system of verbal classifiers and include the anthropomorphic nature of spatial dimensions, structural asymmetry, canonical situation, perceptual salience and pragmatic functions. The suggested approach to explicating the meaning of posture verbs in their standard and non-standard uses may facilitate the solution of applied tasks in teaching Russian as a foreign language."

We use a transmission chain method to establish how context and category salience influence the formation of novel stereotypes through cumulative cultural evolution. We created novel alien targets by combining features from three category dimensions—color, movement, and shape—thereby creating social targets that were individually unique but that also shared category membership with other aliens (e.g., two aliens might be the same color and shape but move differently). At the start of the transmission chains each alien was randomly assigned attributes that described it (e.g., arrogant, caring, confident). Participants were given training on the alien‐attribute assignments and were then tested on their memory for these. The alien‐attribute assignments participants produced during test were used as the training materials for the next participant in the transmission chain. As information was repeatedly transmitted an increasingly simplified, learnable stereotype‐like structure emerged for targets who shared the same color, such that by the end of the chains targets who shared the same color were more likely to share the same attributes (a reanalysis of data from Martin et al., 2014 which we term Experiment 1). The apparent bias toward the formation of novel stereotypes around the color category dimension was also found for objects (Experiment 2). However, when the category dimension of color was made less salient, it no longer dominated the formation of novel stereotypes (Experiment 3). The current findings suggest that context and category salience influence category dimension salience, which in turn influences the cumulative cultural evolution of information.

Searching for a target in a salient region should be easier than looking for one in a nonsalient region. However, we previously discovered a contradictory phenomenon in which a local target in a salient structure was more difficult to find than one in the background. The salient structure was constructed of orientation singletons aligned to each other to form a collinear structure. In the present study, we undertake to determine whether such a masking effect was a result of salience competition between a global structure and the local target. In the first 3 experiments, we increased the salience value of the local target with the hope of adding to its competitive advantage and eventually eliminating the masking effect; nevertheless, the masking effect persisted. In an additional 2 experiments, we reduced salience of the global collinear structure by altering the orientation of the background bars and the masking effect still emerged. Our salience manipulations were validated by a controlled condition in which the global structure was grouped noncollinearly. In this case, local target salience increase (e.g., onset) or global distractor salience reduction (e.g., randomized flanking orientations) effectively removed the facilitation effect of the noncollinear structure. Our data suggest that salience competition is unlikely to explain the collinear masking effect, and other mechanisms such as contour integration, border formation, or the crowding effect may be prospective candidates for further investigation.

Animals are often confronted with more sensory stimuli than they can attend to, and so should pay attention to stimuli that are relevant to them and habituate to those that are not. We investigated attention in the fringe-lipped bat, Trachops cirrhosus, by playing repeated prey sounds to bats in a habituation-discrimination paradigm. We measured two behavioral responses: initial response and habituation rate, and also tested whether the bats discriminated between the different sounds. We found that bats habituated more quickly to sounds of unpalatable prey species, but contrary to our expectation, a bat’s initial response was unrelated to prey palatability. Furthermore, discrimination was only detectable when bats became strongly habituated and they were less attracted to the habituated sound compared to the subsequently presented sound in the stimulus pair. Our results support the idea that in nature, many sounds can draw an animal’s attention initially, but only sounds of ecological significance and perceptual salience maintain an animal’s attention over time. Significance statement: Habituation is an almost ubiquitous way that animals filter environmental information, but is often overlooked in behavioral experiments. Animals may habituate faster to sounds that are unlikely to affect their lives and more slowly to ones that are associated with food or threats. We studied the predatory bat Trachops cirrhosus that hunts using prey sounds. We presented bats with prey and non-prey sounds and observed their responses over time. We found that although bats responded similarly to all the sounds at their onset, they paid attention longer to sounds from palatable prey and habituated quickly to sounds from inedible animals. This species initially attends to new sounds that it hears, but habituates in a way that helps it selectively attend to important stimuli.

Responses to object stimuli are often faster when jutting handles are aligned with responding hands, than when they are not: handle-to-hand correspondence effects. According to a location coding account, locations of visually salient jutting parts determine the spatial coding of objects. This asymmetry then facilitates same-sided responses compared to responses on the opposite side. Alternatively, this effect has been attributed to grasping actions of the left or the right hand afforded by the handle orientation and independent of its salience (affordance activation account). Our experiments were designed to disentangle the effects of pure salience from those of affordance activations. We selected pictures of tools with one salient and non-graspable side, and one graspable and non-salient side (non-jutting handle). Two experiments were run. Each experiment had two groups of participants: one group discriminated the location of the salient side of the object stimuli; the other group discriminated the location of the graspable side of them. In Experiment 1, responses were left and right button presses; in Experiment 2, they were left and right button presses plus reach-and-grasp actions. When visual salience was removed from graspable sides, no correspondence effect was observed between their orientation and the responding hands in both the experiments. Conversely, when salience depended on non-graspable portions, a correspondence effect was produced between their orientation and the responding hand. Overt attention to graspable sides did not potentiate any grasping affordance even when participants executed grasping responses in addition to button presses. Results support the location coding account: performance was influenced by the spatial coding of visually salient properties of objects.

Addiction is accompanied by attentional biases (AB), wherein drug-related cues grab attention independently of their perceptual salience. AB have emerged in different flavours depending on the experimental approach, and their clinical relevance is still debated. In chronic smokers we sought evidence for dissociable attention abnormalities that may play distinct roles in the clinical manifestations of the disorder. Fifty smokers performed a modified visual probe-task measuring two forms of AB and their temporal dynamics, and data on their personality traits and smoking history/ status were collected. Two fully dissociable AB effects were found: A Global effect, reflecting the overall impact of smoke cues on attention, and a Location-specific effect, indexing the impact of smoke cues on visuospatial orienting. Importantly, the two effects could be neatly separated from one another as they: (i) unfolded with dissimilar temporal dynamics, (ii) were accounted for by different sets of predictors associated with personality traits and smoking history and (iii) were not correlated with one another. Importantly, the relevance of each of these two components in the single individual depends on a complex blend of personality traits and smoking habits, a result that future efforts addressing the clinical relevance of addiction-related AB should take into careful consideration., This study was supported by funding provided by the University of Verona to CDL, CC and LC

A number of characteristics of the visual system and of the visual stimulus are invoked to explain involuntary control of attention, including goals, novelty, and perceptual salience. The present experiment tested perceptual salience on a surprise trial, that is, on its unannounced first presentation following trials lacking any salient items, thus eliminating possible confounds by current goals. Moreover, the salient item's location was not singled out by a novel feature, thus eliminating a possible confound by novelty in directing attention. Eye tracking was used to measure involuntary attention. Results show a prioritization of the salient item. However, contrary to predictions of prominent neuro-computational and psychological salience models, prioritization was not fast-acting. Rather the observers' gaze was attracted only as the second fixation on average or later (depending on condition) and with a latency of more than 500 ms on average. These results support the general proposition that salience can control attention. However, contrary to most salience models, the present results indicate that salience changes attentional priority only in novel environments.

This study investigated whether in a stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) task affordance effects in response to picture of graspable objects emerge when these objects appear as already grasped. It also assessed whether the observed effects could be explained as due to spatial compatibility between the most salient part in the object/display and the hand of response rather than to action potentiation. To this aim, we conducted three behavioural experiments in which participants were required to discriminate the vertical orientation (upright vs. inverted) of an object presented in the centre of the screen, while ignoring the right-left orientation of its handle. The object could be presented alone, as already grasped, as partially masked (Experiment 1) or with a human hand close to its graspable side (Experiment 2). In addition, to assess the role of perceptual salience, the object could be presented with a human hand or a non-biological (a geometrical shape) distractor located opposite to the object's graspable side. Results showed faster responses when the object's handle was located on the same side of the responding hand with a larger effect when upright objects were shown as already grasped (Experiment 1) or when a hand was displayed close to its handle (Experiment 2), and a smaller reversed effect when the hand or the geometrical shape was located opposite to the handled side (Experiment 3). We interpreted these findings as indicating that handle orientation effects emerging in SRC tasks may result from the interplay between motor affordance and spatial compatibility mechanisms.

The neural representation and perceptual salience of tonal signals presented in different noise maskers were investigated. The properties of the maskers and signals were varied such that they produced different amounts of either monaural masking release, binaural masking release, or a combination of both. The signals were then presented at different levels above their corresponding masked thresholds and auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) were measured. It was found that, independent of the masking condition, the amplitude of the P2 component of the AEP was similar for the same stimulus levels above masked threshold, suggesting that both monaural and binaural effects of masking release were represented at the level of P2 generation. The perceptual salience of the signal was evaluated at equal levels above masked threshold using a rating task. In contrast to the electrophysiological findings, the subjective ratings of the perceptual signal salience were less consistent with the signal level above masked threshold and varied strongly across listeners and masking conditions. Overall, the results from the present study suggest that the P2 amplitude of the AEP represents an objective indicator of the audibility of a target signal in the presence of complex acoustic maskers.

Despite the prevalent use of alerting sounds in alarms and human-machine interface systems, we have only a rudimentary understanding of what determines auditory salience - the automatic attraction of attention by sound - and the brain mechanisms which underlie this process. A major roadblock to understanding has been the lack of a robust, objective means of quantifying sound-driven attentional capture. Here we demonstrate that microsaccade inhibition – an oculomotor response arising within 300ms of sound onset - is a robust marker for the salience of brief sounds. Specifically, we show that a ‘crowd sourced’ (N=911) subjective salience ranking correlated robustly with the superior colliculus (SC) mediated ocular freezing response measured in naive, passively listening participants (replicated in two groups of N=15 each). More salient sounds evoked earlier microsaccadic inhibition, consistent with a faster orienting response. These results establish that microsaccade-indexed activity within the SC is a practical objective measure for auditory salience. Significance statement Microsaccades are small, rapid, fixational eye movements, measurable with sensitive eye-tracking equipment. We reveal a novel, robust link between microsaccade dynamics and the subjective salience of brief sounds (salience ranking obtained from a large number of participants in an online experiment): Within 300 ms of sound onset, the eyes of naive, passively listening participants demonstrate different microsaccade patterns as a function of the sound’s perceptual salience. These results position the Superior Colliculus (the generator of microsaccades) as an important brain area to investigate in the context of a putative multi-modal salience-hub and establish a robust objective means for quantifying auditory salience, critical in the development of sound-based human machine interfaces.

International audience; This paper introduces a measure of significance on a curve skeleton of a 3D piecewise linear shape mesh, allowing the computation of both the shape's parts and their saliency. We begin by reformulating three existing pruning measures into a non-linear PCA along the skeleton. From this PCA, we then derive a volume-based salience measure, the 3D WEDF, that determines the relative importance to the global shape of the shape part associated to a point of the skeleton. First, we provide robust algorithms for computing the 3D WEDF on a curve skeleton, independent on the number of skeleton branches. Then, we cluster the WEDF values to partition the curve skeleton, and coherently map the decomposition to the associated surface mesh. Thus, we develop an unsupervised hierarchical decomposition of the mesh faces into visually meaningful shape regions that are ordered according to their degree of perceptual salience. The shape analysis tools introduced in this paper are important for many applications including shape comparison, editing, and compression.

How does listeners’ perceptual bias influence their interpretation of an ambiguous multiword utterance? We address this question by investigating the relationship between word order in a binomial (an expression of type "A and B") and visual properties of image pairs serving as its potential referents. We found that listeners’ choices were strongly influenced by iconicity and relative salience of images within the pair: participants preferred referents where the first mentioned image was located on the left, as well as pairs where the first image was larger than the second image. The effect of image order tended to be stronger than the influence of image size, and both were modulated by participants’ general visual field preferences (determined in a separate experimental condition). We further show that binomial phrase interpretation can be simulated by a Rational Speech Act model that includes both word order effects and utterance-independent preferences of the participants.

Infants growing up in bilingual environments succeed at learning two languages. What adaptive processes enable them to master the more complex nature of bilingual input? One possibility is that bilingual infants take greater advantage of the redundancy of the audiovisual speech that they usually experience during social interactions. Thus, we investigated whether bilingual infants’ need to keep languages apart increases their attention to the mouth as a source of redundant and reliable speech cues. We measured selective attention to talking faces in 4-, 8-, and 12-month-old Catalan and Spanish monolingual and bilingual infants. Monolinguals looked more at the eyes than the mouth at 4 months and more at the mouth than the eyes at 8 months in response to both native and nonnative speech, but they looked more at the mouth than the eyes at 12 months only in response to nonnative speech. In contrast, bilinguals looked equally at the eyes and mouth at 4 months, more at the mouth than the eyes at 8 months, and more at the mouth than the eyes at 12 months, and these patterns of responses were found for both native and nonnative speech at all ages. Thus, to support their dual-language acquisition processes, bilingual infants exploit the greater perceptual salience of redundant audiovisual speech cues at an earlier age and for a longer time than monolingual infants.

The ability to segregate sounds from different sound sources is thought to depend on the perceptual salience of differences between the sounds, such as differences in frequency or fundamental frequency (F0). F0 discrimination of complex tones is better for tones with low harmonics than for tones that only contain high harmonics, suggesting greater pitch salience for the former. This leads to the expectation that the sequential stream segregation (streaming) of complex tones should be better for tones with low harmonics than for tones with only high harmonics. However, the results of previous studies are conflicting about whether this is the case. The goals of this study were to determine the effect of harmonic rank on streaming and to establish whether streaming is related to F0 discrimination. Thirteen young normal-hearing participants were tested. Streaming was assessed for pure tones and complex tones containing harmonics with various ranks using sequences of ABA triplets, where A and B differed in frequency or in F0. The participants were asked to try to hear two streams and to indicate when they heard one and when they heard two streams. F0 discrimination was measured for the same tones that were used as A tones in the streaming experiment. Both streaming and F0 discrimination worsened significantly with increasing harmonic rank. There was a significant relationship between streaming and F0 discrimination, indicating that good F0 discrimination is associated with good streaming. This supports the idea that the extent of stream segregation depends on the salience of the perceptual difference between successive sounds.

This paper presents some preliminary comments aiming to explain the vitality of the geolect of Val de Xálima (Cáceres province, Spain), the so‑called a fala. Having in consideration that recently the community of Xálima has faced various sociolinguistic phenomena which could have suppressed its dialectal particularities in the linguistic convergence with Castilian, the author aims to describe a process of reinforcement of the local ethnic identity due to the perceptual salience of the hypothetical "non belonging phonetic features" resulting in the preservation of the geolect. It is also proposed to integrate the factor called by the author: "to speak different" to the Identity Process Theory of G. Breakwell. No artigo apresentam‑se algumas considerações preliminares face a uma proposta de explicação alternativa da vitalidade do geoleto do Val de Xálima (Cáceres, Espanha), a chamada a fala. Tendo em consideração que hoje em dia a comunidade de Xálima tem vindo a enfrentar vários fenómenos de índole sociolinguística que poderiam ter resultado na supressão das particularidades dialetais d’a fala e na convergência linguística com o castelhano, procura‑se descrever um processo de reforço da identidade étnica local baseado na saliência percetiva dos hipotéticos "traços de não‑pertença", que têm vindo a resultar na conservação do geoleto. Consequentemente, propõe‑se inscrever o factor de "falar diferente" na Teoria do Processo Identitário (Identity Process Theory) de G. Breakwell.

The perceptual salience of a target tone presented in a multitone background is increased by the presentation of a precursor sound consisting of the multitone background alone. It has been proposed that this “enhancement” phenomenon results from an effective amplification of the neural response to the target tone. In this study, we tested this hypothesis in humans, by comparing the auditory steady-state response (ASSR) to a target tone that was enhanced by a precursor sound with the ASSR to a target tone that was not enhanced. In order to record neural responses originating in the brainstem, the ASSR was elicited by amplitude modulating the target tone at a frequency close to 80 Hz. The results did not show evidence of an amplified neural response to enhanced tones. In a control condition, we measured the ASSR to a target tone that, instead of being perceptually enhanced by a precursor sound, was acoustically increased in level. This level increase matched the magnitude of enhancement estimated psychophysically with a forward masking paradigm in a previous experimental phase. We found that the ASSR to the tone acoustically increased in level was significantly greater than the ASSR to the tone enhanced by the precursor sound. Overall, our results suggest that the enhancement effect cannot be explained by an amplified neural response at the level of the brainstem. However, an alternative possibility is that brainstem neurons with enhanced responses do not contribute to the scalp-recorded ASSR.

The space between people, or ‘interpersonal distance’, creates and defines the dynamics of social interactions and is a salient cue signaling responsiveness and feeling comfortable. This distance is implicit yet clearly felt, especially if someone stands closer or farther away than expected. Increasing evidence suggests that Oxytocin (OT) serves as a social hormone in humans, and that one of its roles may be to alter the perceptual salience of social cues. Considering that empathic ability may shape the way individuals process social stimuli, we predicted that OT will differentially affect preferred interpersonal distance depending on individual differences in empathy. Participants took part in two interpersonal distance experiments: In the first, they had to stop a (computer visualized) protagonist when feeling most comfortable; in the second, they were asked to choose the room in which they would later discuss intimate topics with another. Both experiments revealed an interaction between the effect of OT and empathy level. Among highly empathic individuals, OT promoted the choice of closer interpersonal distances. Yet, OT had an opposite effect on individuals with low empathic traits. We conclude that the enhancement of social cues following OT administration may have opposite effects on individuals with different empathic abilities.

Previous findings indicate that negative arousal enhances bottom-up attention biases favoring perceptual salient stimuli over less salient stimuli (Sutherland & Mather, 2012). The current study tests whether those effects were driven by emotional arousal or by negative valence by comparing how well participants could identify visually presented letters after hearing either a negative arousing, positive arousing or neutral sound. On each trial, some letters were presented in a high contrast font and some in a low contrast font, creating a set of targets that differed in perceptual salience. Sounds rated as more emotionally arousing led to more identification of highly salient letters but not of less salient letters, whereas sounds’ valence ratings did not impact salience biases. Thus, arousal, rather than valence, is a key factor enhancing visual processing of perceptually salient targets.

Theories of reinforcement learning and approach behavior suggest that reward can increase the perceptual salience of environmental stimuli, ensuring that potential predictors of outcome are noticed in the future. However, outcome commonly follows visual processing of the environment, occurring even when potential reward cues have long disappeared. How can reward feedback retroactively cause now-absent stimuli to become attention-drawing in the future? One possibility is that reward and attention interact to prime lingering visual representations of attended stimuli that sustain through the interval separating stimulus and outcome. Here, we test this idea using multivariate pattern analysis of fMRI data collected from male and female humans. While in the scanner, participants searched for examples of target categories in briefly presented pictures of cityscapes and landscapes. Correct task performance was followed by reward feedback that could randomly have either high or low magnitude. Analysis showed that high-magnitude reward feedback boosted the lingering representation of target categories while reducing the representation of nontarget categories. The magnitude of this effect in each participant predicted the behavioral impact of reward on search performance in subsequent trials. Other analyses show that sensitivity to reward—as expressed in a personality questionnaire and in reactivity to reward feedback in the dopaminergic midbrain—predicted reward-elicited variance in lingering target and nontarget representations. Credit for rewarding outcome thus appears to be assigned to the target representation, causing the visual system to become sensitized for similar objects in the future. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT How do reward-predictive visual stimuli become salient and attention-drawing? In the real world, reward cues precede outcome and reward is commonly received long after potential predictors have disappeared. How can the representation of environmental stimuli be affected by outcome that occurs later in time? Here, we show that reward acts on lingering representations of environmental stimuli that sustain through the interval between stimulus and outcome. Using naturalistic scene stimuli and multivariate pattern analysis of fMRI data, we show that reward boosts the representation of attended objects and reduces the representation of unattended objects. This interaction of attention and reward processing acts to prime vision for stimuli that may serve to predict outcome.

The point of departure of this article is the processes that front vocoids induce as triggers in language. We start with a description of palatalization, using Standard Modern Greek and other Greek dialects as an empirical basis. We then introduce a new, so far undescribed type of palatalization, dubbed strengthened palatalization. Despite its similarity to secondary palatalization, we argue that it is a different process because it is triggered by an unrealized high front /i/, unlike secondary palatalization, where the high vocoid is alongside the preceding consonant as a secondary gesture. Furthermore, the output of strengthened palatalization is different because it lacks the primary cue of secondary palatalization, that is, F2 raising in VC sequences. Next, we examine glide hardening, a process complementary to palatalization because it is also triggered by a high front vocoid. However, in glide hardening the glide is maintained as a separate segment and is strengthened into a palatal fricative (or even a stop). By focusing on the triggers – rather than the outputs, we attain a unified account of both palatalization and glide hardening as enhancement processes that aim at strengthening the phonetic cues of their targets for reasons of perceptual salience.

Perceptual salience improves the encoding of information into visual working memory (WM). However, the factors that contribute to this facilitation effect are not well understood. This study tested the influence of target familiarity on WM encoding. In each trial, participants were presented with either one or three targets and asked to encode their locations into WM. In Experiment 1, target familiarity was manipulated by presenting either an upright (familiar target) or upside-down (unfamiliar/novel target) A. Increasing the novelty of the targets led to improved performance in the spatial WM task. Experiment 2 showed that participants were faster in responding to novel versus familiar targets in a spatial detection task. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the beneficial effect of target novelty on WM encoding was not driven by differences in low-level features. Our results suggest that target novelty enhances the processes required for WM encoding, just as it facilitates perceptual processing.

It has been suggested that affective stimuli automatically capture attention; this preferential processing is thought to be related to the evolutionary significance of affective stimuli. However, recent evidence suggests that perceptual salience alone might explain why some affective stimuli are more likely to influence attentional processes in certain contexts. In this study, we manipulated affective and perceptual salience to better understand how affective information is processed and how it impacts attentional processes in different contexts. We used stimuli that are both affectively and perceptually salient, while varying the task requirement to encourage the processing of perceptually salient (Experiment 1) or affectively salient (Experiment 2) information. This design made it possible to observe independent and interdependent relationships between perceptual and affective salience. The results showed that when the task encouraged the processing of perceptually salient information, affective salience did not influence task performance. In contrast, when the task encouraged the processing of affectively salient information, affectively salient information impaired task performance. The findings suggest that the affective nature of the stimuli does not always influence attentional processes.

The present study appeals to the notions of social organization and Portuguese presence to account for some of the key difference among the creoles spoken in Diu, Daman, and Korlai (India). The concepts of frequency and perceptual salience are tapped to account for some of the similarities among these creoles.

Input control theories of the attentional blink (AB) suggest that this deficit results from impaired attentional selection caused by the post-Target 1 (T1) distractor (Di Lollo, Kawahara, Ghorashi, & Enns, 2005; Olivers, van der Stigchel, & Hulleman, 2007). Accordingly, these theories predict that there should be no AB when no distractors intervene between the targets. Contrary to these hypotheses, Dux, Asplund, and Marois (2008) observed an AB (T3 deficit) when three targets, from the same attentional set, were presented successively in a rapid stream of distractors, if subjects increased the resources they devoted to T1 processing. This result is consistent with resource depletion accounts of the AB. However, Olivers, Spalek, Kawahara, and Di Lollo (2009) argue that Dux et al.’s results can be better explained by the relationship between T1 and T2, and by target discriminability effects, rather than by the relationship between T1 and T3. Here, we find that manipulating the resources subjects devote to T1, either exogenously (target perceptual salience) or endogenously (target task relevance), affects T3 performance, even when T2 and target discriminability differences are controlled for. These results support Dux et al.’s conclusion that T1 resource depletion underlies the AB.

This article presents a model of the southern Kalahari landscape that in the past gave clues for orientation and usability to Taa-speaking hunter-gatherers. Lexical and conceptual changes are detected with respect to what was formerly the most important landform for survival: pans as water sources and sites suitable for camping and foraging. A part-to-whole-change in lexical semantics is paralleled by a conceptual change from a predominance of notions of utility to a predominance of perceptual salience. These changes reflect changes in land-use patterns and were discovered by comparing statements from people of different ages.

The present study examined influences of semantic characteristics of objects in real-world scenes on allocation of attention as reflected in eye movement measures. Stimuli consisted of full-color photographic scenes, and within each scene, the semantic salience of two target objects was manipulated while the objects’ perceptual salience was kept constant. One of the target objects was either inconsistent or consistent with the scene category. In addition, the second target object was either smoking-related or neutral. Two groups of college students, namely current cigarette smokers (N = 18) and non-smokers (N = 19), viewed each scene for ten seconds while their eye movements were recorded. While both groups showed preferential allocation of attention to inconsistent objects, smokers also selectively attended to smoking-related objects. Theoretical implications of the results are discussed.

Previous ERP studies have often reported two ERP components—LAN and P600—in response to subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations (e.g., the boys *runs). However, the latency, amplitude and scalp distribution of these components have been shown to vary depending on various experiment-related factors. One factor that has not received attention is the extent to which the relative perceptual salience related to either the utterance position (verbal inflection in utterance-medial vs. utterance-final contexts) or the type of agreement violation (errors of omission vs. errors of commission) may influence the auditory processing of S-V agreement. The lack of reports on these effects in ERP studies may be due to the fact that most studies have used the visual modality, which does not reveal acoustic information. To address this gap, we used ERPs to measure the brain activity of Australian English-speaking adults while they listened to sentences in which the S-V agreement differed by type of agreement violation and utterance position. We observed early negative and positive clusters (AN/P600 effects) for the overall grammaticality effect. Further analysis revealed that the mean amplitude and distribution of the P600 effect was only significant in contexts where the S-V agreement violation occurred utterance-finally, regardless of the type of agreement violation. The mean amplitude and distribution of the negativity did not differ significantly across types of agreement violation and utterance position. These findings suggest that the increased perceptual salience of the violation in utterance-final position (due to phrase-final lengthening) influenced how S-V agreement violations were processed during sentence comprehension. Implications for the functional interpretation of language-related ERPs and experimental design are discussed.

Research has shown that emotion categorization plays an important role in perception and categorization in the visual domain. In the present paper, we investigated the role of auditory-induced emotions for auditory perception. We further investigated whether the emotional responses mediate other perceptual judgments of sounds. In an experiment, participants either rated general dissimilarities between sounds or dissimilarities of specific aspects of sounds. The results showed that the general perceptual salience map could be explained by both the emotional responses to, and perceptual aspects of, the sounds. Importantly, the perceptual aspects were mediated by emotional responses. Together these results show that emotions are an integral part of auditory perception that is used as the intuitive basis for categorizing everyday sounds. References: Adolphs, R., Emotional vision (2004) Nat. 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