Close coupling between eye movements and serial attentional refreshing during multiple-identity tracking




Jie Li, Lauri Oksama, Jukka Hyönä

PublisherTaylor and Francis Inc.

2018

Journal of Cognitive Psychology

Journal of Cognitive Psychology

30

5-6

609

626

18

2044-5911

2044-592X

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2018.1476517

https://doi.org/10.1080/20445911.2018.1476517



Multiple-identity tracking (MIT) is a dynamic task in which observers track multiple moving objects of distinct identities and then report the location of each target object. The present study examined participant’ eye movements during MIT in order to investigate the relationship between eye movements and attentional performance during the task. The results showed that fixations were predominately directed to individual targets during tracking. When successfully landed on targets, the fixations dwelled for longer duration; otherwise, they were terminated quickly. As the attentional demands for processing the targets increased, fixations landed on the targets more frequently while fixations outside targets decreased both in number and duration. The attentionally more demanding targets were fixated more frequently than the attentionally less demanding ones. The most recently fixated target was tracked with higher performance, while the tracking accuracy for the more previously fixated targets gradually decreased. Taken together, the results indicate that fixations are tightly coupled with attention during MIT, switching serially from target to target for refreshing each object representation to facilitate the tracking of identities and locations of multiple targets.



Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 13:26