title: Subjective disappearance of a target by flickering flankers.
abstract: This study examined the subjective disappearance of a visual object induced by a neighboring flickering ring (Experiments 1 and 2), a set of four flickering dots (Experiment 3), and apparent motion (Experiment 4) as flickering flankers. Observers were asked to report whether a target disappeared during 10 s of stimulus presentation. We used the proportion of disappearance as a measure of performance. Interestingly, subjective disappearance was rarely observed when flickering flankers were presented with a separation of less than 0.5 degrees from the target. However, disappearance was observed when dynamic random-dot patterns were presented with a separation of less than 0.5 degrees from the target border (Experiment 5). Our results indicate that the flicker of flankers near the target disturbs target adaptation or attentional inhibition, causing persistent target representation in higher-order object selection, and resulting in non-disappearance of the target.
authors.affiliation: User Science Institute, Kyushu University, 6-19-1, Hakozaki, Higashi ward, Fukuoka 8128581, Japan. kawabe@usi.kyushu-u.ac.jp
authors.forename: Takahiro
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Kawabe
authors.forename: Kayo
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Miura
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D001364:Awareness; D005425:Flicker Fusion; D006801:Humans; D008960:Models, Psychological; D009038:Motion; D009039:Motion Perception; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation / Q000379:methods; D011601:Psychophysics; D013028:Space Perception; D014796:Visual Perception