Models of salience-based choice have become popular in recent years, although there is still no known set of simple conditions or axioms which implies the existence of a salience function. In this paper, we provide simple and natural axioms that characterize the general class of salience functions. As an application we consider a salience-based model of decision making and show that within that setup the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes is a general property of a salience function and that the properties producing that pattern also account for other anomalies involving risky and intertemporal choice
