Wang Chundi, Zhang Xuemin, Li Yongna, Lyu Chuang
Beijing Key Lab of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University Beijing, China.
Beijing Key Lab of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal UniversityBeijing, China; State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning and IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal UniversityBeijing, China; Center for Collaboration and Innovation in Brain and Learning Sciences, Beijing Normal UniversityBeijing, China.
Front Psychol. 2016 May 4;7:657. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00657. eCollection 2016.
Multiple object tracking (MOT) is an attentional process wherein people track several moving targets among several distractors. Symmetry, an important indicator of regularity, is a general spatial pattern observed in natural and artificial scenes. According to the "laws of perceptual organization" proposed by Gestalt psychologists, regularity is a principle of perceptual grouping, such as similarity and closure. A great deal of research reported that feature-based similarity grouping (e.g., grouping based on color, size, or shape) among targets in MOT tasks can improve tracking performance. However, no additive feature-based grouping effects have been reported where the tracking objects had two or more features. "Additive effect" refers to a greater grouping effect produced by grouping based on multiple cues instead of one cue. Can spatial symmetry produce a similar grouping effect similar to that of feature similarity in MOT tasks? Are the grouping effects based on symmetry and feature similarity additive? This study includes four experiments to address these questions. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated the automatic symmetry-based grouping effects. More importantly, an additive grouping effect of symmetry and feature similarity was observed in Experiments 3 and 4. Our findings indicate that symmetry can produce an enhanced grouping effect in MOT and facilitate the grouping effect based on color or shape similarity. The "where" and "what" pathways might have played an important role in the additive grouping effect.
多目标跟踪（MOT）是一个注意力过程，在此过程中人们在多个干扰物中追踪多个移动目标。对称性作为规律性的一个重要指标，是在自然和人造场景中观察到的一种普遍空间模式。根据格式塔心理学家提出的“知觉组织定律”，规律性是一种知觉分组原则，比如相似性和封闭性。大量研究报告称，多目标跟踪任务中基于特征的相似性分组（例如基于颜色、大小或形状的分组）可以提高跟踪性能。然而，在跟踪对象具有两个或更多特征的情况下，尚未有基于特征的分组的累加效应的相关报道。“累加效应”指的是基于多个线索而非一个线索进行分组所产生的更大的分组效应。在多目标跟踪任务中，空间对称性能否产生与特征相似性类似的分组效应？基于对称性和特征相似性的分组效应是否具有累加性？本研究包含四个实验来回答这些问题。实验1和实验2的结果证明了基于对称性的自动分组效应。更重要的是，在实验3和实验4中观察到了对称性和特征相似性的累加分组效应。我们的研究结果表明，对称性能够在多目标跟踪中产生增强的分组效应，并促进基于颜色或形状相似性的分组效应。“哪里”和“什么”通路可能在累加分组效应中发挥了重要作用。
