Volume 9, Number 11, Article 3, Pages 1-30 doi:10.1167/9.11.3 http://journalofvision.org/9/11/3/ ISSN 1534-7362
No capacity limit in attentional tracking: Evidence for probabilistic inference under a resource constraint
Wei Ji Ma
Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA
[home] [e-mail]
Wei Huang
Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, USA
[home] [e-mail]
Abstract

Human ability to simultaneously track multiple items declines with set size. This effect is commonly attributed to a fixed limit on the number of items that can be attended to, a notion that is formalized in limited-capacity and slot models. Instead, we propose that observers are constrained by stimulus uncertainty that increases with the number of items but use Bayesian inference to achieve optimal performance. We model five data sets from published deviation discrimination experiments that varied set size, number of deviations, and magnitude of deviation. A constrained Bayesian observer better explains each data set than do the traditional limited-capacity model, the recently proposed slots-plus-averaging model, a fixed-uncertainty Bayesian model, a Bayesian model with capacity limit, and a simple averaging model. This indicates that the notion of limited capacity in attentional tracking needs to be revised. Moreover, it supports the idea that Bayesian optimality of human perception extends to high-level perceptual computations.

View full-text

History
Received June 18, 2009; published October 5, 2009
Citation
Ma, W. J., & Huang, W. (2009). No capacity limit in attentional tracking: Evidence for probabilistic inference under a resource constraint. Journal of Vision, 9(11):3, 1-30, http://journalofvision.org/9/11/3/, doi:10.1167/9.11.3.
Keywords
multiple-object tracking, Bayesian observer, attention, change detection
Downloads
155 Total.
 
Search
for articles that cite this paper
for related articles by these authors
for papers that cite this paper
Get citation






jov