Salience (neuroscience)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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When attention deployment is driven by salient stimuli, it is considered to be bottom-up, memory-free, and reactive. Attention can also be guided by top-down, memory-dependent, or anticipatory mechanisms, such as when looking ahead of moving objects or sideways before crossing streets. 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.
The hippocampus participates in the assessment of salience and context using past memories to filter new incoming stimulus; placing those that are most important into the long term memory. The entorhinal cortex is the pathway into and out of the hippocampus and is damaged early on in Parkinsons disease.