Some thoughts I had after a forum discussion I had with William Lambos on his substack on the different Meanings of Salience

Description

Conspicuity

  • conspicuous, dominant, intense, eye-catching, prominent
  • loud, bright, overwhelming the senses

Novelty

  • surprising, novelty, outlier, unexpected

Importance

  • pertinent to the goals, values, or trained responses
  • pre-cognitive pattern-matching to trigger attention

Relevance

  • data and features that are needed for the task at hand
  • signal vs. noise in input
  • function of, or modulated by, attention?

Interestingness

  • a drive for curiosity and play
  • first derivative of subjective beauty or compressibility (Schmidhuber 2009)
  • perceived patterns that create internal mental patterns that can be integrated or reduced in novel ways (I think)