Fang Fang’s group measured the attentional effect of the bottom-up saliency map of natural images. They found the salient region of natural images can attract attention to improve subjects’ orientation discrimination performance at the salient region. Furthermore, the attraction of attention increased with the degree of saliency. Their findings suggest that the bottom-up saliency map of a natural image could be generated at a very early stage of visual processing.

Chen C, Zhang X, Wang Y and Fang F (2013) Measuring the attentional effect of the bottom-up saliency map of natural images. In J. Yang, F. Fang, and C. Sun (Eds): IScIDE 2012, Le ct ure Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) 7751, pp. 539-548, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.