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

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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.