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

你在高峰时间开车上班，准备在车流中左转。当汽车呼啸而过时，你被周围的景象和声音、标志和灯光、商店和停车场、公共汽车和停放的汽车所包围。你还面临着移动的车辆，行人和骑自行车的人，他们都以不同的速度行驶，你必须协调转弯以避免碰撞。在这样的情况下，往往有太多的对象来感知和响应一次。因此，需要选择性注意，选择一些而忽略其他。驾驶时，注意力选择的错误可能是致命的。然而，要在其他物品中选择一个物品，拦截或躲避它，需要有一种方法来“个性化它”，这样它就可以被认为是一个个体，与其他物品分开，甚至与其他看起来相同的物品分开，在它移动时跟踪它。有些人可以个性化和跟踪比其他人更多的东西。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。本研究的目的是（1）。确定个体化发生的条件2）。确定将跟踪限制为3-5个项目的约束，包括那些导致年龄相关下降的项目3）。探索视觉个性化和跟踪如何与其他能力协调，包括转向（在移动时定位身体）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（确定显示器中有多少项目）和多对象跟踪（监视干扰物中许多移动目标的位置）。然而，我也将测量当人们保持平衡（站在原地）、行走或驾驶汽车时，跟踪性能如何用于视觉运动协调。 这项研究对视觉注意、枚举、跟踪、视觉运动协调和平衡理论有着根本性的影响。(The后者对于理解老年人的福尔斯很重要。）然而，还有其他重要的实际影响。在加拿大，汽车碰撞是造成伤害和死亡的主要原因，每年在医疗保健和社会服务方面花费数百万美元。碰撞可能发生在任何年龄，但老年司机在某些类型的碰撞的风险，更有可能死亡或遭受严重伤害的结果。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，驾驶员仍然扮演着重要的角色。通常需要驱动程序接管 在加拿大，这在恶劣天气（冰雪）下尤其必要。 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.