Submission 430
Tracking Objects Beyond View Boundaries: Role of Attention, Memory and Metacognition
SymposiumTalk-01
Presented by: Jiri Lukavsky
In everyday life, we often need to keep track of multiple objects in our environment. Moreover, these objects get occluded or move out of our visual field and we must rely on our memory. We have showed that tracking objects which often disappear beyond the view’s boundary is possible but difficult (Lukavský et al., 2023). Interestingly, under these difficult settings people achieved similar performance in tracking identities relative to usually easier location tracking. We concluded that once people cannot rely on grouping mechanisms, they start to employ additional strategies.
In a subsequent experiment, we decided to assess both confidence and performance in multiple object tracking task. We tested 50 children (age 5 to 7 years) with a gamified version of the task where they tracked 1 to 3 targets out of 8 objects and they assigned one or two stars to each target candidate marking their confidence in the response. After each trial, they were shown the correct responses and how their score adjusted based on the number of stars and correctness of the response. We found no age-related differences in the tracking accuracy (mean 79%) or score (mean 85 out of 132, range 26 to 128). We observed some age-related responses patterns, e.g. younger kids tended not to maximize their score in easy tasks. While the ability to assess confidence might seem unrelated to tracking performance, it aids participants in making informed guesses, thereby influencing their overall performance implicitly.