Incentive salience

Incentive salience. Refers to the attractiveness of external stimuli, events, places and their mental representations; their ability to capture attention. The term, incentive salience, applies always to the perception of external events and to internal representations of those events. Incentive salience must be actively generated (attributed) by the brain and assigned to particular perceptions and representations, based on their association with past activation of mesotelencephalic dopamine systems.

Incentive salience is a psychological process that transforms the perception of stimuli, imbuing them with salience, making them attractive, ‘wanted’, incentive stimuli.