Rapid ocular responses are a robust marker for bottom-up driven auditory salience

Despite the prevalent use of alerting sounds in alarms and human-machine interface systems, we have only a rudimentary understanding of what determines auditory salience - the automatic attraction of attention by sound - and the brain mechanisms which underlie this process. A major roadblock to understanding has been the lack of a robust, objective means of quantifying sound - driven attentional capture. Here we demonstrate that microsaccade inhibition - an oculomotor response arising within 300ms of sound onset - is a robust marker for the salience of brief sounds. Specifically, we show that a 'crowd sourced' (N=911) subjective salience ranking correlated robustly with the superior colliculus (SC) mediated ocular freezing response measured in naive, passively listening participants (replicated in two groups of N=15 each). More salient sounds evoked earlier microsaccadic inhibition, consistent with a faster orienting response. These results establish that microsaccade-indexed activity within the SC is a practical objective measure for auditory salience.