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Points of View

Salience

Nature Methods volume 7, page 773 (2010)Cite this article

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An Erratum to this article was published on 28 January 2011

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In last month's column we explored ways to encode data that enhance 'accuracy' when readers decode information from graphs. This month, we will focus on salience as a way to differentiate graphical symbols and improve 'speed' when reading graphs.

The Nobel Prize–winning work of the neurophysiologists David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel helps us understand how the brain processes visual information. They discovered that individual neurons in the primary visual cortex are highly excitable by features of color, orientation, size and motion, but the neurons' response differs depending on the type of visual stimuli. Some neurons are rapidly excited when individuals are presented with lines at one angle, but other cells respond best to lines at another angle. Complex patterns are processed by later stages of the visual system.

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Figure 1: Salience through visual features.
Figure 2: Visual conjunctions.

Change history

  • 15 December 2010

    In the version of this article initially published, a portion of Figure 1 was missing. The error has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the article.

References

  1. Ware, C. Visual Thinking for Design (Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Burlington Massachusetts, USA, 2008).

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  1. Bang Wong is the creative director of the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.,

    Bang Wong

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  1. Bang Wong
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Wong, B. Salience. Nat Methods 7, 773 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth1010-773

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