When two visual patterns are presented in rapid succession, their contours
may be combined into a single unified percept. This temporal integration is
known to be influenced by such low-level visual factors as stimulus intens
ity, contour proximity, and stimulus duration. In this study we asked wheth
er temporal integration is modulated by an attentional-blink procedure. The
results from a localisation task in experiment 1 and a detection task in e
xperiment 2 pointed to two separate effects. First, greater attentional ava
ilability increased the accuracy of spatial localisation. Second, it increa
sed the duration over which successive stimuli could be integrated. These r
esults imply that theories of visible persistence and visual masking must a
ccount for attentional influences in addition to lower-level effects. They
also have practical implications for use of the temporal-integration task i
n the assessment of group and individual differences.