Feature binding in attentive tracking of distinct objects

Abstract

To what degree can attentive tracking of objects’ motion benefit from increased distinctiveness in the objects’ surface features? To address this question, we asked observers to track four moving digits among a total of eight moving digits. By varying the distinctiveness of the digits’ colour and identity, we found that tracking performance improved when the eight objects were all distinct in colour, digit identity, or both, compared to when the eight objects were identical. However, when the eight objects were distinct in a combination of colour and digit but targets and nontargets shared colour or digit identity, performance enhancement was not observed. Four follow-up experiments extended the range of the feature dimensions generating the effect and ruled out alternative strategic accounts. We conclude that surface features can be used to enhance tracking performance. This enhancement is feature based, revealing a limited degree of feature binding in attentive tracking.

Keywords:

• Multiple-object tracking
• Attentive tracking
• Feature and location binding

Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by NSF 0733764 and NIH 071788. We thank Leah Watson, Khena Swallow, Carrick Williams, Todd Horowitz, and James Brockmole for comments and suggestions.

Notes

¹We thank Todd Horowitz for suggesting this possibility.

²We thank Todd Horowitz for this suggestion. Digits, rather than orientations, were used in the main experiment because the eight digits were more distinctive than the eight orientations.