Figure 1.

Design of experiment 1. Stimuli (i.e., animals or objects) or blank displays were presented in between masks. a, On visible trials, there were 200 ms gaps separating the stimuli from the masks. b, On masked trials, the masks came immediately before and after the stimulus, rendering them completely invisible. c, In the report condition, participants reported on a trial-by-trial basis whether they saw an animal, an object, or nothing. In the no-report condition, the stimulus presentation sequence was the same, but instead of reporting on these stimuli, participants counted the number of times they saw a green circle and reported their count at the end of each block.