Item individuation: Registering, tracking, and reacting to multiple locations at once in complex visuo-spatial displays

你在高峰时间开车去上班，准备左转穿过车流。当汽车呼啸而过时，你周围的景象和声音，标志和灯光，商店和停车场，公共汽车和停放的汽车。你还会遇到移动的车辆、行人和骑自行车的人，他们都以不同的速度行驶，你必须协调你的转弯以避免碰撞。在这样的情况下，经常会有太多的对象同时感知和响应。因此，需要选择性的注意来选择一些而忽略另一些。开车时，注意力选择上的错误可能是致命的。然而，要在其他项目中选择一个项目，拦截或躲避它，需要有一种方法来“个性化它”，这样它就可以被视为一个个体，与其他项目分开，甚至与其他看起来相同的项目分开，跟踪它的移动。有些人可以比其他人同时个性化和跟踪更多的事情。此外，还有年龄差异，但在正常情况下，大多数年轻人可以同时跟踪3-5个。这项研究的目标是：1)确定个性化发生的条件；2)确定将跟踪限制在3-5个项目的约束，包括那些导致年龄相关衰退的项目；3)发现视觉个性化和跟踪如何与其他能力协调，包括转向（当你移动时在空间中定位身体）和平衡。为了实现这些目标，我将使用测量个性化的实验室任务，包括枚举（确定显示中有多少个项目）和多对象跟踪（监视许多移动目标在干扰物中的位置）。然而，我也将测量跟踪性能在人们保持平衡（站在原地）、行走或驾驶汽车时如何用于视觉-运动协调。该研究对视觉注意、枚举、跟踪、视觉运动协调和平衡等理论具有重要的理论意义。（后者对于理解老年人跌倒很重要。）然而，还有其他关键的实际含义。在加拿大，汽车碰撞是造成伤害和死亡的主要原因，每年给社会造成数百万美元的医疗保健和社会服务费用。任何年龄的人都可能发生碰撞，但年龄较大的司机面临某些类型碰撞的风险，更有可能因此死亡或严重受伤。尽管人们一直希望自动驾驶汽车能解决这个问题，但它们还远远不够完美，司机仍然扮演着重要的角色。司机接管通常需要在加拿大，尤其是在恶劣的天气（冰和雪）。通过研究个性化和跟踪，有可能开发预测器来识别对自己和他人构成风险的驾驶员，并开发补救培训以减少碰撞次数。这项研究还可以帮助开发更安全的自动驾驶汽车。

You are driving to work in rush hour, preparing to turn left across traffic. As cars whiz by you are surrounded by sights and sounds, signs and lights, stores and parking lots, buses and parked cars. You are also confronted by moving vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists, all traveling at different rates, and you have to coordinate your turn to avoid collision. In situations such as these, there are often too many objects to perceive and respond to at once. Consequently, selective attention is needed to choose some while ignoring others. When driving, errors in attentional selection could be fatal. However, to select an item among others, to intercept or dodge it, there needs to be a way to "individuate it" so that it can be considered as an individual, separate from others, even others that look the same, tracking it as it moves. Some people can individuate and track more things at once than others. Moreover, there are age differences, but under normal conditions most young adults can track 3-5 at once. The objectives for this research are to 1). determine the conditions under which individuation occurs 2). identify the constraints that limit tracking to 3-5 items including those that cause age-related declines 3). discover how visual individuation and tracking coordinates with other abilities, including steering (positioning the body in space as you move) and balance. To fulfill these objectives, I will be using laboratory tasks that measure individuation, including enumeration (determining how many items there are in a display) and multiple-object tracking (monitoring the positions of a number of moving targets in distractors). However, I will also be measuring how tracking performance is used in visual-motor coordination when people are balancing (standing in place), walking, or driving an automobile. This research has fundamental ramifications for theories of visual attention, enumeration, tracking, visual-motor coordination and balance. (The latter are important to understanding falls in older adults.) However, there are other critical practical implications. In Canada, automobile collisions are a leading cause of injury and death, costing society millions of dollars every year in health care and social services expenses. Collisions may occur at any age, but older drivers are at risk for certain types of collision and are more likely to die or sustain serious injury as a result. Although the hope has been that autonomous vehicles would solve the problem, they are still far from perfect and the driver still plays an important role. Driver takeover is often required in Canada this is especially likely to be necessary in adverse weather (ice and snow). By studying individuation and tracking, it may be possible to develop predictors to identify drivers who pose risks to themselves and others and develop remediation training to reduce the number of collisions. This research can also help inform the development of safer autonomous vehicles.