MORTALITY SALIENCE AND VIDEO GAMES 2 Mortality salience, the realization of the inevitability of death, creates intense psychological terror within humans. Terror Management Theory posits that particular behavioral patterns, such as establishing and defending a worldview, reduce this terror (Greenberg et al., 1990). Behaviors due to mortality salience are strikingly similar to behaviors seen wi...

BACKGROUND Deficits in motivational salience processing have been related to psychotic symptoms and disturbances in dopaminergic neurotransmission. We aimed at exploring changes in salience processing and brain activity during different stages of psychosis and antipsychotic medication effect. METHODS We used fMRI during the Salience Attribution Task to investigate hemodynamic differences betw...

Research using the visual world paradigm has demonstrated that visual input has a rapid effect on language interpretation tasks such as reference resolution and, conversely, that linguistic material-including verbs, prepositions and adjectives-can influence fixations to potential referents. More recent research has started to explore how this effect of linguistic input on fixations is mediated ...

Salience describes the phenomenon by which an object stands out from a scene. While its underlying processes are extensively studied in vision, mechanisms of auditory salience remain largely unknown. Previous studies have used well-controlled auditory scenes to shed light on some of the acoustic attributes that drive the salience of sound events. Unfortunately, the use of constrained stimuli in...

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...

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...