Institute of Psychology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic.
Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, United Kingdom.
PeerJ. 2022 Mar 3;10:e13031. doi: 10.7717/peerj.13031. eCollection 2022.
Although the Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) task is a widely used experimental method for studying divided attention, tracking objects in the real world usually looks different. For example, in the real world, objects are usually clearly distinguishable from each other and also possess different movement patterns. One such case is tracking groups of creatures, such as tracking fish in an aquarium. We used movies of fish in an aquarium and measured general tracking performance in this task (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, we compared tracking accuracy within-subjects in fish tracking, tracking typical MOT stimuli, and in a third condition using standard MOT uniform objects which possessed movement patterns similar to the real fish. This third condition was added to further examine the impact of different motion characteristics on tracking performance. Results within a Bayesian framework showed that tracking real fish shares similarities with tracking simple objects in a typical laboratory MOT task. Furthermore, we observed a close relationship between performance in both laboratory MOT tasks (typical and fish-like) and real fish tracking, suggesting that the commonly used laboratory MOT task possesses a good level of ecological validity.
虽然多目标追踪 (MOT) 任务是一种广泛用于研究分散注意力的实验方法，但在现实世界中追踪物体通常看起来有所不同。例如，在现实世界中，物体通常彼此之间可以清晰区分，并且具有不同的运动模式。跟踪鱼群就是一个这样的例子，例如在水族馆中跟踪鱼类。我们使用了水族馆中的鱼类电影，并在这项任务中测量了一般的跟踪性能（实验 1）。在实验 2 中，我们比较了在鱼类跟踪、跟踪典型 MOT 刺激以及在使用具有类似于真实鱼类运动模式的标准 MOT 均匀物体的第三个条件下的跟踪准确性。添加第三个条件是为了进一步研究不同运动特征对跟踪性能的影响。贝叶斯框架内的结果表明，跟踪真实鱼类与在典型的实验室 MOT 任务中跟踪简单物体具有相似之处。此外，我们还观察到在这两个实验室 MOT 任务（典型和类似鱼类）和真实鱼类跟踪中的表现之间存在密切关系，这表明常用的实验室 MOT 任务具有很好的生态有效性。
