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Selecting Information

It’s finals week, and you’re in your room studying for a difficult exam. Exhausted, you decide to take a break and listen to some music. You don your headphones, press play, and close your eyes. Suddenly you hear a noise. Startled, you open your eyes and remove your headphones, to find that your housemate has just yanked open your bedroom door. “I’ve been yelling at you to pick up your phone for the last five minutes,” she snaps. “What’s going on?!”

The first step of perception, selection, involves focusing attention on certain sights, sounds, tastes, touches, or smells in our environment. Consider the housemate example. Once you hear her enter, you would likely select her communication as the focus of your attention. The moment you do this, the process of perception begins: you watch and listen, trying to organize what she is saying into a coherent mental image and to make sense of its meaning. You might even select a more narrow aspect of her verbal or nonverbal communication as your attention focus: her loud and angry voice or a certain phrase that she uses.

The degree to which particular people or aspects of their communication attract our attention is known as salience (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). When something is salient, it seems especially noticeable and significant. We view aspects of interpersonal communication as salient under three conditions (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). First, communication is salient if the communicator behaves in a visually and audibly stimulating fashion. A yelling and energetically gesturing housemate is more salient than a housemate standing motionless and quietly informing us about a phone call. Second, communication becomes salient if our goals or expectations lead us to view it as significant. Even a housemate’s softly spoken phone announcement will command our attention if we are anticipating an important call. Last, communication that deviates from our expectations is salient. An unexpected verbal attack will always be more salient than an expected one.