Attentional capture by dynamic cues.

Attention orients to an object that abruptly onsets, because the object's appearance alters the visual scene. In this report, the question was whether there would, similarly, be attentional prioritization of an existing object that changes its dynamic status. Attention may be deployed immediately to the object because its new dynamic status, potentially, also could alter the visual environment. This report focused on the capture capacity of an object--made up of four spots--that abruptly began rotating, thereby endowing it with two dynamic features: motion-onset, apparent when the object transitioned from stationary to moving, and its specific motion trajectory. Because the rotating spots were irrelevant to the main letter-identification task, there ought not to be top-down attentional orienting to them. We asked two questions: (a) whether the rotating object captures attention automatically, and (b) whether both its dynamic features contribute to attentional capture. Four experiments were reported. The observer's attentional set was manipulated by varying, across experiments, the target's diagnostic feature. We examined how the different attentional sets modulated capture. The results showed that the rotating object only succeeded in capturing attention when the attentional system was set to monitor dynamic features.