Minimum-contrast dominate visual search on complex-color background

As we know, the visual attention is greatly influenced by color salience although there are many other important factors such as orientation and spatial frequency. In this study, serial experiments of target search on complex background have been performed. As a result, all experiment results indicate that the response time (RT) is mainly dominated by the minimum-contrast rather than the mean-contrast or the maximum-contrast. This paper suggests that the target salience ought to be measured by the minimum-contrast between target and background in visual search based on color, and propose a salience model based on the minimum-contrast.