Attentively segregated moving elements are effortlessly integrated to drive pursuit

Multiple Object Tracking(MOT) developed by Pylyshyn and Storm(1988) has been widely used in the study of capacity-limited and object-based attention. Many researchers interested in finding out whether or not the tracking processes in MOT occupy attentional resource and what type of resource is used. The typical paradigm used in this line of research is dual-task paradigm. Participants were asked to perform a visual or auditory task and the MOT task simultaneously. MOT performance was interfered by both the visual and the auditory task. However, the interference of visual task and auditory task with MOT occurred at different levels. The previous studies demonstrated that the MOT task and visual task occupy visual attention resources. Although the MOT task and auditory task don't occupy visual attention resources, they share more central attention resources(such as executive function). Multiple Identity Tracking(MIT) is a variant of MOT, in which each object carries a unique identity. The previous studies also included both visual or auditory task and MIT task, but those studies have not examined how the visual/auditory task affects the MIT task when the two tasks shared the same properties. The current study included 3 experiments and aimed to investigate the influence of a visual or auditory task on either MOT or MIT task. The first two experiments manipulated participants' eye movement to compare the different effects of visual task and auditory task on MOT performance. The result of experiment 1A showed that the auditory task interfered more with MOT than did the visual task when eyes were fixated at the center of the screen. However, the auditory task yielded less interference with MOT when there was no eye movement control in experiment 1B. The results indicated that the tracking processes in MOT not only occupy visual attention resources, but also occupy central attention resources(such as executive function). The experiment 2 applied visual and auditory digit judgment task and MIT task. When the object identity(marked by a digit) was identical to the number in the digit judgment, the MIT performance was facilitated by both the visual and auditory task. It is possible that the process of digit activated the target identities(the same digits) that was stored in visual working memory during tracking.

Walking while simultaneously engaged in another activity becomes more difficult as one grows older. Here, we address the issue of changes in dual-task behavior at different stages of life, particularly in the latter stages. We developed a dual task that combined walking along an 8-m walkway with a multiple object tracking (MOT) task of increasing difficulty. This secondary cognitive task imitates visuospatial daily activities and provides reliable quantitative measurements. Our dual-task paradigm was tested on 27 young adults (23.85 ± 2.09 years old) and two groups of older adults (18 young-old and 18 old-old adults, aged 63.89 ± 3.32 and 80.83 ± 3.84 years, respectively). Significant decrease in tracking performance with increasing complexity of the MOT task was found in all three groups. An age-related decrease in MOT and gait performance was also found. However, young-old adults performed as well as young adults under low attentional load conditions (in the MOT task and simple walking), whereas their performance was as impaired as those of old-old adults under high attentional load conditions (in the MOT task and walking under dual-task condition). These different profiles between the two groups of older participants could be explained in terms of compensation strategies and risk of falling.

Simultaneous tracking of the position of the ball and player locations and activities places high demands on visual attention in team ball sport athletes. Owing to their extensive sports training, these athletes may be expected to exhibit visual attention skills superior to non-athletes; however, the results of studies examining this are inconsistent. Thus, the first aim of this study was to assess the impact of participating in a team ball sport on visual attention. There is limited empirical evidence indicating a sex difference in visual attention, and few studies have reported on visual attention in male and female athletes. Thus, the second aim of this study was to determine whether team ball sport experience affected any sex differences in visual attention. In total, 44 highly skilled basketball players—22 men (mean age: 21.86 ± 2.15 years) with a mean (SD) of 8.46 (2.92) years training experience and 22 women (mean age: 21.32 ± 1.58 years) with a mean (SD) of 8.22 (2.44) years of training experience—and 44 non-athletic undergraduate college students—22 men (mean age: 21.62 ± 1.88 years) and 22 women (mean age: 21.55 ± 1.72 years)—were recruited and completed this study. Visual attention was measured by using the multiple object tracking (MOT) task. Skilled basketball players showed superior tracking accuracy to non-athletic college students on the MOT task. A significant sex difference was found only among the non-athletic college students, with better tracking accuracy for men than for women on the MOT task. By contrast, no significant sex difference was observed among the skilled basketball players for tracking accuracy on the MOT task. These findings indicated that team ball sport training may enhance visual attention as assessed by tracking accuracy. Given that the male and female basketball players in this study had similar training experience and game performance demands, long-term team ball sport experience appeared to minimize the sex difference in visual attention found among non-athletic students.

Previous research has revealed the uniqueness-facilitation effect in the multiple object tracking (MOT) task: simple distinct identities and surface features of moving targets could facilitate attentional tracking. By adapting compound stimuli, the present study investigated whether the global or local properties played the main role in the uniqueness-facilitation effect in the MOT task. The uniqueness of local properties, of global properties or of both local and global properties were considered. Observers’ tracking performance in alternative conditions were compared with that in the homogeneous condition wherein all stimuli have identical local and global properties. Results from two experiments suggest that the global properties played the key role in facilitating tracking. The distinctiveness of local properties can also facilitate tracking with global properties being homogeneous. However, when the stimuli’s global properties are distinct from each other—whether the local properties being unique or not—observers’ tracking performance can achieve the same level as that in the unitary-uniqueness condition wherein the moving objects were distinct unitary letters. These results revealed a global superiority effect in the MOT task. Finally, the facilitation effects of the global and local properties might depend on the stimulus sparsity. When the compound stimuli had fewer local elements, the uniqueness facilitation effect on tracking decreased.

BackgroundThis study aimed to investigate whether performance in a multiple object tracking (MOT) task could be improved incrementally with sports expertise, and whether differences between experienced and less experienced athletes, or non-athletes, were modulated by load.MethodsWe asked 22 elite and 20 intermediate basketball players, and 23 non-athletes, to perform an MOT task under three attentional load conditions (two, three, and four targets). Accuracies were analyzed to examine whether different levels of sports expertise influence MOT task performance.ResultsThe elite athletes displayed better tracking performance compared with the intermediate or non-athletes when tracking three or four targets. However, no significant difference was found between the intermediate athletes and the non-athletes. Further, no differences were observed among the three groups when tracking two targets.DiscussionThe results suggest that the effects of expertise in team ball sports could transfer to a non-sports-specific attention task. These transfer effects to general cognitive functions occur only in elite athletes with extensive training under higher attentional load.

Multiple object tracking (MOT) is generally regarded as a pure attention-consuming task that draws heavily on attention resources. In the present study, we adopted a cross-channel visual-audio dual-task paradigm, i.e., the MOT task combined with the concurrent auditory N-back working memory task, to test whether working memory indeed plays a necessary role in the process of multiple tracking, as well as to further identify the specific types of working memory components involved in this process. Experiments 1a and 1b examined the relationship between the MOT task and nonspatial object working memory (OWM) processing by manipulatingthe tracking load and working memory load, respectively. Results in both experiments indicated that the concurrent nonspatial OWM task did not have a significant effect on the tracking capacity of the MOT task. In contrast, Experiments 2a and 2b examined the relationship between the MOT task and spatial working memory (SWM) processing by a similar approach. Results in both experiments indicated that the concurrent SWM task significantly impaired the tracking capacity of the MOT task, showing a gradual decrease with increasing SWM load. Overall, our study provides empirical evidence that multiple object tracking does involve working memory, primarily related to spatial working memory rather than nonspatial object working memory, which sheds more light on the mechanisms of multiple object tracking.

Speech is often degraded by environmental noise or hearing impairment. People can compensate for degradation, but this requires cognitive effort. Previous research has identified frontotemporal networks involved in effortful perception, but materials in these works were also less intelligible, and so it is not clear whether activity reflected effort or intelligibility differences. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess the degree to which spoken sentences were processed under distraction and whether this depended on speech quality even when intelligibility of degraded speech was matched to that of clear speech (close to 100%). On each trial, male and female human participants either attended to a sentence or to a concurrent multiple object tracking (MOT) task that imposed parametric cognitive load. Activity in bilateral anterior insula reflected task demands; during the MOT task, activity increased as cognitive load increased, and during speech listening, activity increased as speech became more degraded. In marked contrast, activity in bilateral anterior temporal cortex was speech selective and gated by attention when speech was degraded. In this region, performance of the MOT task with a trivial load blocked processing of degraded speech, whereas processing of clear speech was unaffected. As load increased, responses to clear speech in these areas declined, consistent with reduced capacity to process it. This result dissociates cognitive control from speech processing; substantially less cognitive control is required to process clear speech than is required to understand even very mildly degraded, 100% intelligible speech. Perceptual and control systems clearly interact dynamically during real-world speech comprehension.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Speech is often perfectly intelligible even when degraded, for example, by background sound, phone transmission, or hearing loss. How does degradation alter cognitive demands? Here, we use fMRI to demonstrate a novel and critical role for cognitive control in the processing of mildly degraded but perfectly intelligible speech. We compare speech that is matched for intelligibility but differs in putative control demands, dissociating cognitive control from speech processing. We also impose a parametric cognitive load during perception, dissociating processes that depend on tasks from those that depend on available capacity. Our findings distinguish between frontal and temporal contributions to speech perception and reveal a hidden cost to processing mildly degraded speech, underscoring the importance of cognitive control for everyday speech comprehension.

With the increased sophistication of technology, humans have the possibility to offload a variety of tasks to algorithms. Here, we investigated whether the extent to which people are willing to offload an attentionally demanding task to an algorithm is modulated by the availability of a bonus task and by the knowledge about the algorithm’s capacity. Participants performed a multiple object tracking (MOT) task which required them to visually track targets on a screen. Participants could offload an unlimited number of targets to a “computer partner”. If participants decided to offload the entire task to the computer, they could instead perform a bonus task which resulted in additional financial gain—however, this gain was conditional on a high performance accuracy in the MOT task. Thus, participants should only offload the entire task if they trusted the computer to perform accurately. We found that participants were significantly more willing to completely offload the task if they were informed beforehand that the computer’s accuracy was flawless (Experiment 1 vs. 2). Participants’ offloading behavior was not significantly affected by whether the bonus task was incentivized or not (Experiment 2 vs. 3). These results combined with those from our previous study (Wahn et al. in PLoS ONE 18:e0286102, 2023), which did not include a bonus task but was identical otherwise, show that the human willingness to offload an attentionally demanding task to an algorithm is considerably boosted by the availability of a bonus task—even if not incentivized—and by the knowledge about the algorithm’s capacity.

This study aimed to assess the impact of manipulating postural stability during the execution of the multiple objects tracking (MOT) task on gaze behaviour. Twenty-eight males performed the MOT task under three levels of postural stability while eye movements were recorded. Postural stability had a significant impact on MOT scores and gaze behaviour. Participants exhibited worse MOT performance (p < 0.001, η² = 0.20) in less stable conditions, showing a reduced fixation duration (p = 0.020, η² = 0.09) and increased saccade frequency (p = 0.013, η² = 0.10). As stability conditions decreased, participants shifted their gaze strategies by an average of 12.34% of the time distribution from maintaining fixation on a central location to adopting the target-looking strategy. Additionally, the decline in MOT scores with decreasing stability was correlated with a reduction in fixation duration (r = 0.409, p = 0.031). The findings evidence that gaze behaviour during MOT is dependent on postural stability and MOT performance is influenced by the chosen gaze strategy. Key points Reduced postural stability significantly impairs the ability to track multiple objects. Changes in postural stability during a multiple object tracking task affect gaze behaviour by alterations in fixation duration and saccadic frequency. Decrease in multiple object tracking task scores is associated with alterations in gaze behaviour, specifically a reduction in fixation duration. Participants shifted their gaze strategies from maintaining fixation on a central location to adopting a saccadic target-looking strategy as stability conditions decreased.

Feedback is beneficial for learning. Nevertheless, it remains unclear whether (i) feedback draws attentional resources when integrated and (ii) the benefits of feedback for learning can be demonstrated using an attention-based task. We therefore (i) isolated feedback-specific load from task-specific load via individual differences in attention resource capacity and (ii) examined the effect of trial-by-trial feedback (i.e., present vs. absent) on learning a multiple object-tracking (MOT) paradigm. We chose MOT because it is a robust measure of attention resource capacity. In Study 1 participants tracked one (i.e., lowest attentional load condition) through four target items (i.e., highest load condition) among eight total items. One group (n = 32) received trial-by-trial feedback whereas the other group (n = 32) did not. The absence of feedback resulted in better MOT performance compared with the presence of feedback. Moreover, the difference in MOT capability between groups increased as the task-specific attentional load increased. These findings suggest that feedback integration requires attentional resources. Study 2 examined whether the absence (n = 19) or presence (n = 19) of feedback affects learning on the same MOT task across four testing days. When holding task-specific load constant, improvement in MOT was greater with feedback than without. Although this study is the first to isolate feedback-specific load in attention with MOT, more evidence is needed to demonstrate how the benefits of feedback translate to improvement on an attention-based task. These findings encourage future research to further explore the interaction between feedback, attention and learning.

The paradigm of multiple object tracking (MOT) is an established tool for investigating human performance under conditions of divided attention to several objects. We studied change detection ability for colour and shape information in the setting of MOT. Subjects had to detect colour and shape changes during an MOT task. These changes occurred either openly (with nothing to hide them) or with a mud splash in the background to hide the change transient signal. Our experiment demonstrated that (1) when hidden by mud splashes, we fail to perceive a considerable number of colour changes even in the attended objects (i.e., targets) and (2) the visual system is significantly more likely to miss colour and shape changes in distractors than in target. We conclude that a colour change will be detected a lot more efficiently if attention is drawn to its transient. When a simultaneous mud splash hides the transient signal, subjects are significantly less efficient in detecting the change.

Despite considerable similarities between multiple object tracking (MOT) and single object tracking (SOT) tasks, modern MOT methods have not benefited from the development of SOT ones to achieve satisfactory performance. The major reason for this situation is that it is inappropriate and inefficient to apply multiple SOT models directly to the MOT task, although advanced SOT methods are of the strong discriminative power and can run at fast speeds.In this paper, we propose a novel and end-to-end trainable MOT architecture that extends CenterNet by adding an SOT branch for tracking objects in parallel with the existing branch for object detection, allowing the MOT task to benefit from the strong discriminative power of SOT methods in an effective and efficient way. Unlike most existing SOT methods which learn to distinguish the target object from its local backgrounds, the added SOT branch trains a separate SOT model per target online to distinguish the target from its surrounding targets, assigning SOT models the novel discrimination. Moreover, similar to the detection branch, the SOT branch treats objects as points, making its online learning efficient even if multiple targets are processed simultaneously. Without tricks, the proposed tracker achieves MOTAs of 0.710 and 0.686, IDF1s of 0.719 and 0.714, on MOT17 and MOT20 benchmarks, respectively, while running at 16 FPS on MOT17.

Attentional effort relates to the allocation of limited-capacity attentional resources to meet current task demands and involves the activation of top-down attentional systems in the brain. Pupillometry is a sensitive measure of this intensity aspect of top-down attentional control. Studies relate pupillary changes in response to cognitive processing to activity in the locus coeruleus (LC), which is the main hub of the brain's noradrenergic system and it is thought to modulate the operations of the brain's attentional systems. In the present study, participants performed a visual divided attention task known as multiple object tracking (MOT) while their pupil sizes were recorded by use of an infrared eye tracker and then were tested again with the same paradigm while brain activity was recorded using fMRI. We hypothesized that the individual pupil dilations, as an index of individual differences in mental effort, as originally proposed by Kahneman (1973), would be a better predictor of LC activity than the number of tracked objects during MOT. The current results support our hypothesis, since we observed pupil-related activity in the LC. Moreover, the changes in the pupil correlated with activity in the superior colliculus and the right thalamus, as well as cortical activity in the dorsal attention network, which previous studies have shown to be strongly activated during visual tracking of multiple targets. Follow-up pupillometric analyses of the MOT task in the same individuals also revealed that individual differences to cognitive load can be remarkably stable over a lag of several years. To our knowledge this is the first study using pupil dilations as an index of attentional effort in the MOT task and also relating these to functional changes in the brain that directly implicate the LC-NE system in the allocation of processing resources.

Multiple object tracking (MOT) plays an important role in intelligent video-processing tasks, which aims to detect and track all moving objects in a scene. Joint-detection-and-tracking (JDT) methods are thriving in MOT tasks, because they accomplish the detection and data association in a single stage. However, the slow training convergence and insufficient data association limit the performance of JDT methods. In this paper, the anchor-based query (ABQ) is proposed to improve the design of the JDT methods for faster training convergence. By augmenting the coordinates of the anchor boxes into the learnable queries of the decoder, the ABQ introduces explicit prior spatial knowledge into the queries to focus the query-to-feature learning of the JDT methods on the local region, which leads to faster training speed and better performance. Moreover, a new template matching (TM) module is designed for the JDT methods, which enables the JDT methods to associate the detection results and trajectories with historical features. Finally, a new transformer-based MOT method, ABQ-Track, is proposed. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of the two modules, and the ABQ-Track surpasses the performance of the baseline JDT methods, TransTrack. Specifically, the ABQ-Track only needs to train for 50 epochs to achieve convergence, while that for TransTrack is 150 epochs.

Introduction The ability to simultaneously track numerous moving objects in the presence of irrelevant stimuli is essential for successfully carrying out a variety of tasks. Sleep loss impairs neurocognitive functioning and, as a result, attentional processing capacity is reduced. The objective of the current study was to determine if performance on the multiple object tracking (MOT) task was adversely impacted by a week of chronic sleep restriction (CSR). Methods Twelve healthy participants (6 males, 6 females) kept a fixed sleep-wake schedule, with a constant waketime, at home for four weeks (actigraphy confirmed compliance). During weeks one and three, participants maintained 9 hours in bed. During weeks two and four, participants were randomly assigned to 5 and 9 hours of sleep. Following weeks two and four, participants completed a 13-hour laboratory visit under dim light (&amp;lt; 15 lux), where they maintained a constant posture and were provided with hourly isocaloric snacks. MOT was presented at approximately 6 and 8 hours after waking. Participants were required to track four, five, or six moving targets in the presence of identical distractors (always 12 total objects). Results Participants slept significantly less when assigned to 5 (M = 4.43 hours, SD = 0.33 hours), compared to 9 hours of sleep (M = 7.42 hours, SD = 0.42 hours; F (1, 22) = 206.89, p = 0.00). The proportion of correct MOT responses was significantly lower following 5 (M = 0.70, SD = 0.15) compared to 9 hours of sleep (M = 0.77, SD = 0.12; F (1, 22) = 10.29, p &amp;lt; .05). Conclusion A week of CSR adversely impacted MOT performance compared to a week of sleep satiation. These findings have implications for individuals, such as air traffic controllers and truck drivers, who must visually track multiple moving objects, often while chronically sleep deprived. Support Supported by the Force Health Protection Program of the Office of Naval Research (SAA2402925-1, Contract Award no. N0001418IP00050).