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.