Value-based decisions optimize the relation of costs and benefits. Costs and benefits confer not only value but also salience, which may influence decision making through attentional mechanisms. However, the computational and neurobiological role of salience in value-based decisions remains elusive. Here we develop and contrast two formal concepts of salience for value-based choices involving c...

Most associative learning studies describe the salience of stimuli as a fixed learning-rate parameter. Presumptive saliency signals, however, have also been linked to motivational and attentional processes. An interesting possibility, therefore, is that discriminative stimuli could also acquire salience as they become powerful predictors of outcomes. To explore this idea, we first characterized...

Social group memberships are primarily studied in quasi-experimental contexts, but how can culture, class and gender be manipulated true experimental designs? This review highlights the different empirical strategies that used to manipulate “culture” as it relates race/ethnicity (activation of thinking styles, language, priming cultural constructs), (social standing, status, or perceived social...

BACKGROUND It has been suggested that some psychotic symptoms reflect 'aberrant salience', related to dysfunctional reward learning. To test this hypothesis we investigated whether patients with schizophrenia showed impaired learning of task-relevant stimulus-reinforcement associations in the presence of distracting task-irrelevant cues. METHOD We tested 20 medicated patients with schizophren...

The survival of animals depends critically on prioritizing responses to motivationally salient stimuli. While it is generally believed that motivational salience increases decision speed, the quantitative relationship between motivational salience and decision speed, measured by reaction time (RT), remains unclear. Here we show that the neural correlate of motivational salience in the basal for...

Intense motivational salience attribution is considered to have a major role in the development of different psychopathologies. Numerous brain areas are involved in "normal" motivational salience attribution processes; however, it is not clear whether common or different neural mechanisms also underlie intense motivational salience attribution. To elucidate this a brain area and a neural system...

background as the under-representation of women in management positions continues to persist globally, little is known about the experiences of women in the healthcare sector in the context of the developing middle eastern nations. in an attempt to address this knowledge gap, the current study explores some of the barriers that hinder and the enablers that foster women’s career advancement in t...

Many factors influence visual search, including how much targets stand out (i.e., their visual salience) and whether they are currently relevant (i.e., Are they in working memory?). Although these are two known influences on search performance, it is unclear how they interact to guide attention. The present study explored this interplay by having participants hold an item in memory for a subseq...