Amongst the many factors which govern an individual's ability to quickly identify objects within a visual field, saliency is one which plays a major role. Saliency is the measure of an items uniqueness relative to its surroundings. Generally, items which are more salient tend to be more noticeable than their low-salient counterparts.

Although, previous research on saliency across dimensions find that saliency's effect on visual search is non-specific it is still unknown how the effects of salience and different target types interact with each other. How quickly can different types of target items with varying amounts of saliency be identified? This question was investigated using a naturalistic search task. The targets were products which had relatively high or low visual salience; there were also three varying conditions for target items (original, black and white, alternate viewpoint).

The analysis essentially revealed that visual salience did not have an effect on how quickly targets were identified, regardless of the strength of the target representation. This finding contradicts previous research, which has found that highly salient items are found faster than low salient items.