>>A simple rule of thumb: if it's far from the reader and you want to get his attention, flash. If it's right in front of his nose and you want to annoy him, flash. If it's a little piece of something in a corner of a screen and you want attenttion, flash it. In any other situation, better don't.
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>>I could have written this for not millions of dolars - just remove the plural here and I'd still be fine.
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>And right you are.:)
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>The effectiveness of flashing signals based on the most fundamental behavioral reflex: the orientation reflex. One can just do the quick Google search on "orientation reflex" to come up with this definition, for example: "Orientation reflex is a fundamental change of behaviour, where the eyes, head and body are turned toward an alarming external stimulus." This is involuntary reaction to something that changes appearance near you (moves, increases the size, blinks). Obviously, this is the reason why predators move very slowly towards the prey to make a sudden jump when it's too late for the prey to react and escape.
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>Don't you just involuntary turn your head when somebody passes by behind you, when you sit in your cubicle? ("What is it?" :) That is where "common sense" is coming from.
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...
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>Sure, the response time may be not that critical for the most of software applications, but one can easily see where the requests for flashing signs come from.
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>They come from the most important biological reflex, and when somebody tells me that millions of dollars were spent to prove that the fundamental orientation reflex is wrong - I can only laugh.

I actually think the "millions of dollars in research" applies to general study of users' behavior with previous versions of Windows. Flashing text must have been high on the list of annoying things - just because it was overused in days of character mode, when there were few graphical effects available. Flashing text for no good reason is close to crying "wolf" - do it few times and you get everybody rubbed the wrong way, aka pis*ed off.

And I'm not amazed that Microsoft would spend millions investigating what annoys the users :).