Three experiments were carried out to investigate the importance of dynamic cues in monaural and binaural detection tasks. All experiments employed a two‐interval forced‐choice procedure, in which the signal, a 500‐Hz tone, 128 msec in duration, was added to the masker prior to gating in one of the two intervals. Both monaural (signal and masker diotic: M0–S0) and binaural (diotic masker, signal phase‐reversed in one ear relative to the other: M0–Sπ) conditions were investigated. The masker (70 dB SPL) was either a tone of 500 Hz (Experiment 1), a 500‐Hz carrier tone modulated by a 50‐Hz tone (Experiment 2), or a 500‐Hz carrier tone modulated by a band‐pass noise centered at 60 Hz (Experiment 3). The angle of addition of the signal to the masker (α) was either 0°, 45°, 90° or 135°. In general, for all values of α, S0 thresholds increased from Experiment 1 to Experiment 3, indicating that monaural signal detection is more difficult in a dynamic than in a static environment. Sπ thresholds did not change significantly from Experiment 1 to Experiment 2, thus giving no support to the notion that detection of regularly varying interaural cues (at a modulation frequency of 50 Hz) is easier than detection of static cues. However, Sπ thresholds in Experiment 3 were slightly higher than in Experiment 2, indicating that detection of randomly fluctuating interaural cues is more difficult than detection of regularly fluctuating cues.