Visual Salience

CORE DEFINITION

A concept from visual attention research describing how bottom-up features such as contrast, edges, motion, and color automatically draw attention, independently of the viewer's goals. The core proposition is that attention is allocated by two interacting systems, one driven by stimulus properties and one by the task, so designers can predict and steer where a viewer looks. The key qualification is that salience determines where attention lands, not what is understood; an element can be maximally noticeable and still convey nothing, which is why salience must be spent on content that matters.