Inappropriate capture by diversionary dynamic elements

Greater capture of attention by a diversionary element that appeared to move (a dynamic stimulus) than by one that was static was shown in six experiments. In Experiment 1, an irrelevant dynamic stimulus captured attention when there were either two, four, or eight elements on the screen, and was shown with irregularly spaced characters. In the subsequent experiments, a dynamic element captured attention even when the targets never appeared at that location. In Experiment 6, when the response was in error, that response was most likely to be the identity of the character near the location of the dynamic diversionary element. These data could not be accounted for by either an attentional control setting, or a singleton detection mode hypothesis. The targets were the same throughout each experiment and only the type of diversions differed. The data seem to reflect the greater strength of dynamic stimuli in capturing attention.