Bruce - Those are good tips. I've used that flashlight trick before; sometimes it even works from a standing position if you use a flashlight with a concentrated beam - it acts like a spotlight tofocus your attention and highlight small objects.
Here's two more tips:
1. Take an object identical to the dropped object and place it on the floor. For example,if you dropped a screw, place an identical screw on the floor. This tells you what the dropped object is going to look like when you search for it and helps you do mental "pattern matching."
2. Go ahead and sweep the floor! The collect all of the sweepings in a dustpan and look for your dropped item. You get a swept floor as a bonus, and maybe find a couple other things you dropped a while back. Sometimes if I drop a common object like a nut or screw, if I don't spot it immediately I don't even bother to look for it. I just grab another one from the part drawer, knowing I'll find it on the next sweep-up.
One last trick: Dropped objects always seem to bounce under the workbench. I installed "kickboards" on the bottom front of my workbenches to keep that from happening (make them easy to remove, because somehow stuff seems to get under there anyway!).
