The salience (also called saliency) of an item is its state or quality of standing out relative to other items. Saliency detection is considered to be a key attentional mechanism that aids learning and survival by enabling organisms to focus their limited neurocomputational resources on a small yet pertinent subset of the available sensory data. Saliency can arise from spatial, temporal, or spatiotemporal differences, such as a red dot surrounded by white dots, a flickering message indicator of an answering machine, or a red dot moving relative to a white background. While these examples focus on visual saliency, similar mechanisms operate in other sensory modalities - sounds, flavors, scents, etc., can all stand out and attract attention. When attention is deployed based on salient stimuli, it is considered to be bottom-up, memory-free, and reactive. In contrast, when attention is deployed based on prior knowledge and expectations, such as when looking ahead of moving objects or sideways before crossing streets, it is referred to as top-down, memory-guided, or anticipatory. Humans and other animals cannot pay attention to more than one or very few items simultaneously, so they are faced with the challenge of continuously integrating and prioritizing different bottom-up and top-down influences. These integrative mechanisms are poorly understood. Look up Attention in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... A supervised child learning the countries of Asia on the floor of the central hall of the Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois Learning is the process of acquiring knowledge, skills, attitudes, or values, through study, experience, or teaching, that causes a change of behavior that is persistent, measurable, and specified or... In psychology, sensation is the first stage in the chain of biochemical and neurologic events that begins with the impinging of a stimulus upon the receptor cells of a sensory organ, which then leads to perception, the mental state that is reflected in statements like I see a uniformly blue... Data is the plural of datum. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Top-down and Bottom-up are approaches to the software development process, and by extension to other procedures, mostly involving software. ... Top-down and Bottom-up are approaches to the software development process, and by extension to other procedures, mostly involving software. ... Top-down and Bottom-up are approaches to the software development process, and by extension to other procedures, mostly involving software. ... Top-down and Bottom-up are approaches to the software development process, and by extension to other procedures, mostly involving software. ...

External links

• A review of research on visual saliency from a computational perspective