1. Stimulus

1. Doing a motion-induced blindness experiment requires software or a programming environment that can make simple animations and collect keypress responses.
2. The basic motion-induced blindness stimulus involves three features: a square made up of bright blue crosses on a black background, a bright yellow disc towards one of the corners of the space occupied by the square, and a white disc in the centre of the screen to serve as a fixation point. Figure 1 shows a single frame of basic motion-induced blindness stimulus.
3. Set the square of blue crosses to rotate continuously in one direction, as though the square is pegged down by a fixation point.

Figure 1: A single frame containing the motion-induced blindness stimulus. In the dynamic version, the square of blue crosses rotates around the central fixation point, while the yellow dot remains stationary.

2. Producing the illusion

1. To experience the illusion, fixate the white disc in the center of the stimulus, but also attend to the yellow disc as you watch the motion of the blue crosses. The yellow disc should disappear from awareness, even though it never actually disappears from the screen.

3. Running an experiment

1. To run a basic experiment, create a slightly different version of the stimulus. Rather than the one yellow disc in the upper left corner of the stimulus, include a yellow disc in the right corner and one on the bottom as well, for a total of three yellow discs. Figure 2 shows a single frame from such a stimulus.

Figure 2: A single frame of a simple motion-induced blindness experiment. Participants are asked to report the number of yellow discs absent from their awareness at each moment.

2. Instruct a participant to fixate on the center point while attending to the stimulus widely.
3. Tell the participant that the experiment will involve 5, 30-s trials. In each trial they should fixate and attend to the stimulus, and they should report when discs disappear from awareness as follows:
   1. If one disc is absent, hold down the 'J' key. If two are absent, hold down the 'K' key, and if three are absent, hold down the 'L' key. Adjust which keys are held down as discs enter and disappear from awareness. And when all the discs are perceived, be sure to release all the keys.
4. The experiment program should record the participant's key presses.