Subjective disappearance of a target by flickering flankers

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° from the target. However, disappearance was observed when dynamic random-dot patterns were presented with a separation of less than 0.5° 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.