Volume 7, Number 13, Article 14, Pages 1-10 doi:10.1167/7.13.14 http://journalofvision.org/7/13/14/ ISSN 1534-7362
How many objects can you track?: Evidence for a resource-limited attentive tracking mechanism
George A. Alvarez
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
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Steven L. Franconeri
Department of Psychology Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
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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.

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History
Received March 15, 2007; published October 30, 2007
Citation
Alvarez, G. A., & Franconeri, S. L. (2007). How many objects can you track?: Evidence for a resource-limited attentive tracking mechanism. Journal of Vision, 7(13):14, 1-10, http://journalofvision.org/7/13/14/, doi:10.1167/7.13.14.
Keywords
multiple object tracking, MOT, multi-element tracking, attentive tracking, FINST, FLEX, attention, capacity
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