The role of attention in temporal integration

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.