How many objects can you track? Evidence for a resource-limited attentive tracking mechanism
How many objects can you track? Evidence for a resource-limited attentive tracking mechanism
复制标题
DOI：
10.1167/7.13.14
复制
发表时间：
2007-01-01
影响因子：
1.8
通讯作者：
Franconeri, Steven L.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Alvarez, George A.;Franconeri, Steven L.
我们与视觉世界的大部分互动都要求我们将一些当前重要的对象与其他不太重要的对象隔离开来。当物体移动时，或者当我们的视野相对于世界移动时，这项任务变得更加困难，需要我们在空间和时间上跟踪这些物体。之前的实验表明，观察者最多可以跟踪大约 4 个移动物体。对于这种容量限制的一个自然解释是，视觉系统在架构上仅限于一次处理固定数量的对象，即所谓的视觉注意力神奇数字 4。与此相反，实验 1 表明跟踪容量不是固定的。在低速下，最多可以跟踪 8 个物体，但在高速下，只能跟踪一个物体。实验2表明，跟踪的限制与注意力的空间分辨率有关。这些发现表明，可跟踪的对象数量主要由灵活分配的资源决定，这对对象跟踪机制以及对象跟踪与其他认知过程之间的关系具有重要意义。
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.