Direct behavioral and neural evidence for an offset-triggered conscious perception

Many previous theories of perceptual awareness assume that a conscious representation of a stimulus is created from sensory information carried by an onset (appearance) of the stimulus. In contrast, here we provide behavioral and neural evidence for a new phenomenon in which conscious perception is directly triggered by an offset (disappearance) of a stimulus. When a stimulus made invisible by inter-ocular suppression physically disappeared from a screen, subjects reported an appearance (not disappearance) of that stimulus, correctly reporting a color of the disappeared stimulus. Measurements of brain activity further confirmed that the physical offset of an invisible stimulus evoked neural activity reflecting conscious perception of that stimulus. Those results indicate a new role of a stimulus offset to facilitate (rather than inhibit) an emergence of consciousness.