VISUAL-MOTION AND ATTENTIONAL CAPTURE

Previous work has shown that abrupt visual onsets capture attention. T his occurs even with stimuli that are equiluminant with the background , which suggests that the appearance of a new perceptual object, not m erely a change in luminance, captures attention. Three experiments are reported in which this work was extended by investigating the possibl e role of visual motion in attentional capture. Experiment 1 revealed that motion can efficiently guide attention when it is perfectly infor mative about the location of a visual search target, but that it does not draw attention when it does not predict the target's position. Thi s result was obtained with several forms of motion, including oscillat ion, looming, and nearby moving contours. To account for these and oth er results, we tested a new-object account of attentional capture in E xperiment 2 by using a global/local paradigm. When motion segregated a local letter from its perceptual group, the local letter captured att ention as indexed by an effect on latency of response to the task-rele vant global configuration. Experiment 3 ruled out the possibility that the motion in Experiment 2 captured attention merely by increasing th e salience of the moving object. We argue instead that when motion seg regates a perceptual element from a perceptual group, a new perceptual object is created, and this event captures attention. Together, the r esults suggest that motion as such does not capture attention but that the appearance of a new perceptual object does.