Dynamic modulation of location-based surround suppression by feature salience and stimulus presentation time.

Visual attention is suppressed for targets that are located close to the attended location, but recovered for more distant targets, which is known as the location-based surround suppression. This study aimed to investigate whether the location-based surround suppression is modulated by the color salience or presentation time of features at these locations. Participants discriminated whether two targets on a circle were identical or different after one of them was cued. Low-salience with a short-time condition (i.e., baseline), low-salience with a long-time condition, and high-salience cue with a short-time condition were employed in Experiments 1-3. High-salience cue-targets with a long-time condition, no-cue control condition, and high-salience targets with a short-time condition were employed in Experiments 4-6. Discrimination accuracy gradually increased with increasing inter-target distance under the low-salience with short-time condition, indicating that nearby targets might fall within the cued target's suppressive surround, but distant targets might not. Not only accuracy but also reaction time evidence for surround suppression was found under the long-time condition or high-salience cue condition in Experiments 2-3, revealing that surround suppression is more pronounced under these two conditions. However, surround suppression disappeared once the high-salience targets were employed in Experiments 4-6, even under the long-time condition. These findings demonstrated that location-based surround suppression is dynamically modulated by the interaction of three factors: top-down control (cue salience), bottom-up competition (target salience), and availability of feedback-processing resources (stimulus presentation time).