Abstract
This study investigates the tracking facilitation effect during categorical distinction between targets and distractors in the Multiple Identity Tracking task. We asked observers to track four targets in a total of eight moving objects, and manipulated categorical distinctions of targets and distractors across four experiments, with different combinations of inter-category and intra-category differences. Results show that tracking performance was significantly better when the targets and distractors were inter-category different, compared to when the targets and distractors were identical or intra-category distinctive. As the inter-category distinction between targets and distractors narrowed, tracking performance improved, but the inter-category facilitation effect decreased. These results may indicate a category-based grouping effect: the observers organized the targets within the same semantic category into one group and made the targets more easily and accurately rediscovered when lost during tracking. Furthermore, the tracking facilitation of categorical distinction diminished when all the objects were inverted. This proved that besides their visual distinctiveness, objects’ semantic category information also played an important role during tracking.
Highlights
Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) tasks have been used to study the ability of humans to keep track of multiple moving objects and the cognitive processing of visual attention (Pylyshyn and Storm, 1988; Scholl, 2009)
When the targets and distractors belong to different categories, would observers organize targets into one group during tracking and improve tracking performance? When the categorical distinction between the targets and distractors narrows, would the category-based grouping effect be weakened? To answer these questions, the present study aimed to explore the facilitation effect when targets and distractors belong to different categories, as well as the persistence of the effect as the categorical distinction narrows
One exception is that no significant difference was found between the intra-category homogenous condition and inter-category conditions. These results suggest that the categorical distinction of targets and distractors improved tracking performance when the categorical difference was between land mammals and fruits, which are all natural objects
Summary
Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) tasks have been used to study the ability of humans to keep track of multiple moving objects and the cognitive processing of visual attention (Pylyshyn and Storm, 1988; Scholl, 2009). Different from MOT, Multiple Identity Tracking (MIT) tasks employ objects with unique features (such as different colors, numbers, animals, or human faces) as tracking stimuli to investigate the effects of unique object features or identities on tracking performance and identity processing in dynamic scenes (Oksama and Hyönä, 2004, 2008; Makovski and Jiang, 2009a,b). We explore the effect of categorical organization on dynamic object tracking, by applying objects carrying categorical information in a variant of MIT task
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