Seeing the disappearance of unseen objects

Because of the massive amount of incoming visual information, perception is fundamentally selective. We are aware of only a small subset of our visual input at any given moment, and a great deal of activity can occur right in front of our eyes without reaching awareness. While previous work has shown that even salient visual objects can go unseen, here we demonstrate the opposite pattern, wherein observers perceive stimuli which are not physically present. In particular, we show in two motion-induced blindness experiments that unseen objects can momentarily reenter awareness when they physically disappear: in some situations, you can see the disappearance of something you can't see. Moreover, when a stimulus changes outside of awareness in this situation and then physically disappears, observers momentarily see the altered versionöthus perceiving properties of an object that they had never seen before, after that object is already gone. This phenomenon of `perceptual reentry' yields new insights into the relationship between visual memory and conscious awareness.