Northwestern University, Department of Psychology, 2029 Sheridan Rd., Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2010 Jul;21(7):920-5. doi: 10.1177/0956797610373935. Epub 2010 Jun 9.
In dealing with a dynamic world, people have the ability to maintain selective attention on a subset of moving objects in the environment. Performance in such multiple-object tracking is limited by three primary factors-the number of objects that one can track, the speed at which one can track them, and how close together they can be. We argue that this last limit, of object spacing, is the root cause of all performance constraints in multiple-object tracking. In two experiments, we found that as long as the distribution of object spacing is held constant, tracking performance is unaffected by large changes in object speed and tracking time. These results suggest that barring object-spacing constraints, people could reliably track an unlimited number of objects as fast as they could track a single object.
在应对动态世界时，人们有能力在环境中的一组移动对象中选择性地保持注意力。在这种多目标跟踪中，表现受到三个主要因素的限制——一个人可以跟踪的对象数量、跟踪它们的速度以及它们之间的接近程度。我们认为，最后一个限制因素，即对象间隔，是多目标跟踪中所有性能限制的根本原因。在两项实验中，我们发现只要对象间隔的分布保持不变，那么跟踪性能就不会受到对象速度和跟踪时间的大幅变化的影响。这些结果表明，除非受到对象间隔的限制，否则人们可以可靠地跟踪无限数量的对象，速度与跟踪单个对象一样快。
