Elicited salience and salience-based level-k

•I measure salience in nine different ways.•The elicited salience patterns are surprisingly similar.•All measures differ clearly from the level-0 pattern needed to fit Hide&Seek data.•Conversely, level-k based on any of the elicited patterns yields a poor data fit.

A level-k model based on a specific salience-pattern is the only model in the literature that accounts for behaviour in hide-and-seek games. This paper presents nine different experiments designed to measure salience. The elicited salience patterns tend to be similar, but none of them is similar to the pattern needed to allow the level-k model explain the hide-and-seek data. When based on any of the empirical salience measures, the salience-based level-k model does not fit the data well.