Recent research has shown that focused attention can be divided into two independent foci in about 80ms (Jefferies & Witt, 2019). We know little, however, about the factors that influence the rate of dividing attention.Here we examined the effects of bilingualism and cultural background on the rate of dividing attention. In Experiment 1, the rate of dividing attention was compared in monolingual and bilingual individuals. Bilinguals are known to disengage attention more rapidly than monolinguals (Mishra et al., 2012) and were thus expected to divide attention more rapidly. To assess this, we employed a dual-stream Attentional Blink paradigm with simultaneous dis-tractor streams to the left and right of fixation. One component of the AB, Lag-1 sparing, occurs only if the second of two sequential targets appears at an attended region.Accordingly, we can determine whether attention is unitary or divided by presenting the second target between the streams and assessing whether Lag-1 sparing occurs. The timecourse of dividing attention was assessed by manipulating the stimulus-onset-asynchrony between the targets.The results confirmed that bilingual individuals divide attention more rapidly than monolinguals. In Experiment 2, we compared the rate of dividing attention in individuals raised in East Asian cultures or a Western culture. Cultural back-ground is known to influence whether individuals focus on the global or local details of a scene, and was thus expected to modulate the rate of dividing attention. The results showed that individuals from East Asian cultures divide attention more rapidly than individuals from Western cultures.