Keeping track of multiple objects: How and when is it learned?

i-eca0cf2af9fc3ac4445c7dff7d8aab70-research.gifHow many moving objects can you keep track of at once? Clicking on the image below will take you to Lana M. Trick's web site, where she has a nifty demo of a multi-object tracking task. You're asked to keep track one to four of the smiley-faces as they move randomly around the screen. Then when the faces stop moving, you click on the ones you were supposed to follow. Go ahead, give it a try!

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You'll notice there are four levels of difficulty. Most adults can, with a little practice, track four out of ten randomly moving objects for ten seconds -- they fall apart when there are more than four objects to track or more than ten total objects (the "most difficult" trial features four objects to track and twelve total). But when do kids develop the ability to track multiple objects? Very young infants can track a single object moving by itself quite easily, but what about several objects moving among others?

Trick's research team developed a task that could be followed by kids as young as five. Previous studies of multiple-object tracking used colored shapes, which were uninteresting to young kids, who became distracted during the task. Trick's team told kids they'd be looking for sinister "spies" among normal, happy people (just like the demo you just tried). They found that five-year-olds understood the task, and reliably completed it when the faces weren't moving. Then they performed the same test on kids ranging in age from 5 to 19. The results are below.

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As expected, 19-year-olds were accurate at tracking "spies," even when there were four of them. But younger kids' abilities tapered off at different levels. Six-year-olds, for example, were just 55 percent accurate when asked to track three items.

This information alone doesn't tell us how many objects they successfully tracked, because they might have guessed on some of the objects. That's what the gray lines on the graph are for. The light gray line indicates the expected result if the viewer guessed on one object. For example, if a child was supposed to follow two objects and successfully followed one of them, she'd be guaranteed to be 50 percent correct, but she'd have a 1 in 9 chance of guessing the second item as well, so her expected average score in this case would be about 56 percent. The dark gray line shows the expected scores if participants guessed on two of the objects.

Six-year-olds, by this logic, can successfully track two objects, because their score is above the chance result when tracking two objects, but below it when tracking three. Eight-year-olds, however, can track three objects. Only 19-year-olds could track four objects successfully.

So how do kids learn to track more objects? They might learn based on their environment. What if a child plays lots of action-oriented video games? Trick's team actually asked parents to indicate the types of video games their kids played, and those who played lots of intense action games (as opposed to things like racing games where keeping track of several objects wasn't as important) did perform significantly better on the task. Kids who played action sports like soccer and basketball (as opposed to swimming or golf) also performed better -- though not as well as video gamers. Clearly this is a skill that can be learned.

But perhaps it's simply a matter of visual working memory. Maybe the number of moving objects you can track is simply related to the number of static objects you can remember. Trick et al. argue that this isn't likely, since even five-year-olds can easily remember the locations of as many as ten static objects. Another possibility is that older kids are better at ignoring distractors. In a separate study Trick's team found that 19-year-olds couldn't track four objects when there were 14 objects on the screen (compared to the 10 in this study), so it's likely that younger kids would also have trouble with more distractors. Yet this experiment doesn't tell us whether the number of distractors is the key facto. The authors recommend that future studies vary both the number of items tracked and the number of distractors.

We've reported on additional work on multiple object tracking here.

Trick, L.M., Jaspers-Fayer, F., & Sethi, N. (2005). Multiple-object tracking in children: The "catch the spies" task. Cognitive Development, 20, 373-387.

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I found it a bit difficult to tract 4 objects at the same time, does this imply that I may have some kind of problem (I'm 18)?!

Becky:

No, you don't have a problem: In the study, there were just 10 objects flying around while you tracked four. Also, you would have had quite a bit of practice tries before the real thing.

In the sample, there were 12 objects, which makes the task considerably more difficult. When there are 14 objects in total, most 19 year olds can only track 3 objects.

4 is usually the mean for adults tracking ability. Really the only way (besides individual differences and hours of practice) to change your ability to track more is by slowing down the dots and avoiding close crossings.

Some new good literature can be found from Steve Franconeri and George Alvarez.

ohh.. oops its still under review - in anycase here it is for when it does come out:

Alvarez, G. A., & Franconeri, S. L. (under review). How many objects can you track? Evidence for a resource-limited tracking mechanism.

You wrote:
> Only 19-year-olds could track four objects successfully.

However, on the graph both the light green line (12 year olds) and the dark green line (19 year olds) are above the light gray line (expected result if the viewer guessed on one object.) So, I would infer that both 12 and 19-year-olds are able to track four objects successfully.

So, I would infer that both 12 and 19-year-olds are able to track four objects successfully.

Actually, there's a lot more variance in the 12-year-old scores compared to the 19-year-olds, so you can't make that generalization. We'd need a larger sample to know if the result for 12-year-olds is significant.

Well that's pretty cool, I managed to track four of them.

By Rean John (not verified) on 05 May 2007 #permalink

Yay, got em all on first try. I am winnar! :D

By Fireblend (not verified) on 05 May 2007 #permalink

Alvarez (2003) - The capacity of visual short-term memory is set both by visual information load and by number of objects shows tracking two items in each visual hemifield is easier than tracking four items in a single hemifield. It seems tracking capacities (and maybe attention routines) are lateralized.