How Many Objects Can You Track?: Evidence for a Resource-Limited Attentive Tracking Mechanism
Citation
Alvarez, George A., and Steven L. Franconeri. "How Many Objects Can You Track? Evidence for a Resource-limited Attentive Tracking Mechanism." Journal Of Vision 7, no. 13 (2007): 14.1-10.Abstract
Much of our interaction with the visual world requires us to isolate some currently important objects from other less important objects. This task becomes more difficult when objects move, or when our field of view moves relative to the world, requiring us to track these objects over space and time. Previous experiments have shown that observers can track a maximum of about 4 moving objects. A natural explanation for this capacity limit is that the visual system is architecturally limited to handling a fixed number of objects at once, a so-called magical number 4 on visual attention. In contrast to this view, Experiment 1 shows that tracking capacity is not fixed. At slow speeds it is possible to track up to 8 objects, and yet there are fast speeds at which only a single object can be tracked. Experiment 2 suggests that that the limit on tracking is related to the spatial resolution of attention. These findings suggest that the number of objects that can be tracked is primarily set by a flexibly allocated resource, which has important implications for the mechanisms of object tracking and for the relationship between object tracking and other cognitive processes.Terms of Use
This article is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#LAACitable link to this page
http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41056876
Collections
- FAS Scholarly Articles [17584]
Contact administrator regarding this item (to report mistakes or request changes)
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Tracking Replicability As a Method of Post-Publication Open Evaluation
Hartshorne, Joshua Keiles; Schachner, Adena Michelle (Frontiers Research Foundation, 2012)Recent reports have suggested that many published results are unreliable. To increase the reliability and accuracy of published papers, multiple changes have been proposed, such as changes in statistical methods. We support ... -
Tracking progression of patient state of health in critical care using inferred shared dynamics in physiological time series
Lehman, Li-Wei; Nemati, Shamim; Adams, Ryan Prescott; Moody, George; Malhotra, Atul; Mark, Rodger G. (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 2013)Physiologic systems generate complex dynamics in their output signals that reflect the changing state of the underlying control systems. In this work, we used a switching vector autoregressive (switching VAR) framework to ... -
Tracking Cell Fate with Synthetic Memory Circuits
Burrill, Devin Rene (2013-03-18)The capacity of cells to sense transient environmental cues and activate prolonged cellular responses is a recurring biological feature relevant to disease development and stem cell differentiation. While biologically ...