Are Abrupt Onsets Highly Salient?

Abstract

Abrupt onsets are commonly assumed to be a class of stimuli with high physical salience. This high salience has been used to explain past findings showing abrupt onsets captured attention more strongly compared to other types of distractors, such as color singletons. However, there has been a lack of consensus about the definition and measurement of physical salience. As a result, it is unclear if abrupt onsets capture attention more strongly simply because they are more salient than other types of stimuli. Using a psychophysical technique recently developed by Stilwell et al. (2023), we explicitly quantified the level of physical salience of abrupt onsets, color singletons, and color singleton onsets. Surprisingly, abrupt onsets were the least salient among the three types of items examined. Despite this, only abrupt onsets captured attention in a subsequent visual search task, whereas color singletons and color singleton onsets were both suppressed. Thus, abrupt onsets tend to capture attention more strongly than color singletons, but this is not apparently because of high physical salience. Indeed, high physical salience may make an object easier to suppress during visual search.