B.1.6.2. Salience time-course

The present experiments were mainly concerned with salience time-course. The salience life expectancy varied with the incentive to rely on salience. By default, salience effects seemed to last rather long, consistently with the classical viewpoint (e.g. Itti & Koch, 2001; Theeuwes, 1993; Wolfe, 1994). At first sight, these results seemed in contradiction with those of Donk and van Zoest (2008), who found salience to be only transiently represented. However, as argued, these latter results likely involved endogenous counteraction of salience effects. The present set of experiments evidenced 1) that genuine long lasting salience effects could be observed and that this likely corresponded to a default mode and 2) that endogenous influences could indeed counteract these salience effects. Thus, the present results were consistent with the the classical viewpoint of salience effects that lasted long when not harmful for the task. They also suggested that endogenous influences were indeed involved in the experiments of Donk and van Zoest (2008), as suggested in the introduction, thus allowing to interpret them in the classical theoretical frame of visual selective attention (Itti & Koch, 2001; Koch & Ullman, 1985; Theeuwes, 1993).