The temporal frequencies underlying character localization and identification tasks are measured as a test of the hypothesis that the two tasks are processed in different cortial pathways and receive contributions from different populations of visual cortical neurons. A temporal lobe pathway appears to process object identity information, while a parietal lobe pathway may be responsible for processing spatial relations or detecting peripheral objects for attention allocation or foveation (Ungerleider & Mishkin, 1982). Data from two-pluse and temporal contract sensitivity experiments support this mode: localization depends upon much higher temporal frequencies than character identification when both are tested in the periphery. Foveal presentations demonstrate that detection and identification tasks rely on the same temporal frequencies. In a control experiment, the letters were blurred to restrict the range of spatial frequencies. However, these stimuli replicated earlier results and demonstrate that the use of higher temporal frequencies by the localization tasks cannot be attributed to the use of different spatial frequencies for different tasks. In addition, near-foveal presentations of the localization task replicate findings from the far periphery, suggesting that the localization task may be processed differently from the detection task regardless of location of the retina. The results are consistent with a physiological model that suggests that temporal differences appear early in the visual processing stream and remain partially segregated throught the primary visual cortex and on to the parietal and temporal lobe pathways.