Horowitz Todd S, Birnkrant Randall S, Fencsik David E, Tran Linda, Wolfe Jeremy M
Visual Attention Laboratory, Brigham and Women's Hospital, 64 Sidney Street, Suite 170, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2006 Jun;13(3):516-23. doi: 10.3758/bf03193879.
We previously demonstrated that observers in multiple object tracking experiments can successfully track targets when all the objects simultaneously vanish for periods lasting several hundred milliseconds (Alvarez, Horowitz, Arsenio, Dimase, and Wolfe, 2005). How do observers do this? Since observers can track objects that move behind occluders (e.g., Scholl and Pylyshyn, 1999), they may treat a temporal gap as a case of complete occlusion. If so, performance should improve if occlusion cues (deletion and accretion) are provided and items disappear and reappear one by one (asynchronously), rather than simultaneously. However, we found better performance with simultaneous than with asynchronous disappearance (Experiment 1), whereas occlusion cues were detrimental (Experiment 2). We propose that observers tolerate a gap in tracking by storing the current task state when objects vanish and resuming tracking on the basis of that memory when the objects reappear (a task-switching account).
我们之前证明，在多目标跟踪实验中，当所有物体同时消失数百毫秒时，观察者仍能成功跟踪目标（阿尔瓦雷斯、霍洛维茨、阿尔塞尼奥、迪马斯和沃尔夫，2005年）。观察者是如何做到这一点的呢？由于观察者能够跟踪在遮挡物后面移动的物体（例如，肖尔和皮利欣，1999年），他们可能会将时间间隙视为完全遮挡的情况。如果是这样的话，当提供遮挡线索（消失和重现）且物体逐个（异步）而非同时消失和重新出现时，跟踪性能应该会提高。然而，我们发现同时消失时的性能比异步消失时更好（实验1），而遮挡线索则会产生不利影响（实验2）。我们提出，观察者通过在物体消失时存储当前任务状态，并在物体重新出现时基于该记忆恢复跟踪（一种任务切换解释）来容忍跟踪中的间隙。
