Holcombe Alex O, Chen Wei-Ying
School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.
J Vis. 2013 Jan 9;13(1):12. doi: 10.1167/13.1.12.
Overall performance when tracking moving targets is known to be poorer for larger numbers of targets, but the specific effect on tracking's temporal resolution has never been investigated. We document a broad range of display parameters for which visual tracking is limited by temporal frequency (the interval between when a target is at each location and a distracter moves in and replaces it) rather than by object speed. We tested tracking of one, two, and three moving targets while the eyes remained fixed. Variation of the number of distracters and their speed revealed both speed limits and temporal frequency limits on tracking. The temporal frequency limit fell from 7 Hz with one target to 4 Hz with two targets and 2.6 Hz with three targets. The large size of this performance decrease implies that in the two-target condition participants would have done better by tracking only one of the two targets and ignoring the other. These effects are predicted by serial models involving a single tracking focus that must switch among the targets, sampling the position of only one target at a time. If parallel processing theories are to explain why dividing the tracking resource reduces temporal resolution so markedly, supplemental assumptions will be required.
已知在跟踪移动目标时,目标数量越多,整体表现越差,但对跟踪时间分辨率的具体影响从未被研究过。我们记录了一系列显示参数,在这些参数下,视觉跟踪受时间频率(目标在每个位置与干扰物进入并取代它之间的时间间隔)限制,而非物体速度限制。我们在眼睛保持固定的情况下测试了对一、二和三个移动目标的跟踪。干扰物数量及其速度的变化揭示了跟踪中的速度限制和时间频率限制。时间频率限制从一个目标时的7赫兹降至两个目标时的4赫兹和三个目标时的2.6赫兹。这种性能下降幅度很大,这意味着在双目标条件下,参与者只跟踪两个目标中的一个而忽略另一个会表现得更好。这些效应由涉及单个跟踪焦点的串行模型预测,该焦点必须在目标之间切换,一次仅对一个目标的位置进行采样。如果并行处理理论要解释为什么分配跟踪资源会如此显著地降低时间分辨率,就需要补充假设。