When one object is partly occluded by another, its occluded parts are perce
ptually 'filled in', that is, the occluded object appears to continue behin
d its occluder. This process is known as amodal completion(1). The completi
on of a partially occluded object takes about 200 ms (ref. 2), and pre-comp
letion information (that is, information from before amodal completion has
occurred) exists in the visual system for that duration(2,3). It has been s
uggested, however, that observers cannot make use of this information, even
when it is beneficial to do so: visual search for a target that appears to
be partly occluded, for example, is slower than for a target that does not
undergo occlusion, despite both targets being physically identical(4-6). H
ere we show that visual search does have access to pre-completion represent
ations, but only for a limited time that depends on the size of the occlude
d region.