Reappearance of the suppressed object was found to be relatively slow and required the target to appear for 300–400 ms after cue presentation. These results are consistent with reports suggesting that the transition between awareness states is not immediate, but rather, requires the representations to be integrated within a continuous time window (Mitroff & Scholl,
2004). We also considered the possible effects of eye movements. Similar to Troxler, MIB reappearance is highly sensitive to small fixational eye movements (i.e., micro-saccades) (Bonneh et al.,
2010,
2014). However, whereas stimulus driven microsaccades are influenced by the likelihood of the stimulus appearance (Bonneh, Adini, Sagi, Tsodyks, Fried, & Arieli,
2013; Valsecchi, Betta, & Turatto,
2007), our findings show no effect of the uncertainty level on the reappearances of the invisible. To test directly for the possible effect of microsaccades, we carried out a supplementary experiment in which we monitored eye movements (four observers). In this experiment (see
Figure 7), the stimuli consisted of collinear and orthogonal cues (4
λ separation), with time windows of 400, 600, and 1000 ms. As in the main experiments, the reported reappearance was affected by the spatial relations (
Figure 7a). However, very few microsaccades preceded the reappearance: One or more microsaccades were found in less than 10% of the trials, in a window of 0–600 ms, in which reappearance rate was above 90% (
Figure 7a, compare “same” to “same m-s,” see also
Figure 7b). These results rule out any role for microsaccades in the interactions reported here.