Effects of salience are long-lived and stubborn

Salience is a core determinant of attentional processing. Although information on salience has been shown to dissipate within a few hundred milliseconds, we recently observed massive effects of salience on the delayed recall from visual working memory more than 1,300 ms after stimulus onset. Here, we manipulated presentation duration of the memory display and found that effects of salience, albeit decreasing over time, were still markedly present after 3,000 ms (2,000 ms presentation; Experiment 1). In an attempt to overrule this persistent influence of salience, we made less salient stimuli more relevant (by rewarding their prioritized processing in Experiment 2 or by probing them more often in Experiment 3). Participants were unable to reliably prioritize low-salience stimuli. Thus, our results demonstrate that effects of salience or their repercussions have surprisingly long-lasting effects on cognitive performance that reach even relatively late processing stages and are difficult to overrule by volition.