Examined the order in which 24 undergraduates recognize and respond to different levels of structure within a visual display. Previous experiments show that information about global characteristics of an array is extracted by the visual system before information about local characteristics. Results from a task in which S must attend to both global and local information demonstrate that local information had a large influence on RT even when information at the global level was sufficient to determine the response. This finding implies that local information becomes available to decision processes with a time course similar to that of global information. Effects previously attributed to the order in which different levels of structure are recognized may result from differential ease of directing attention to these different levels and selecting responses based on them.