Abstract:

The Multiple Identity Tracking (MIT) requires participants to track and report both the targets and their identities. The MIT was developed from the Multiple Object Tracking (MOT) task, except that the target and non-target may be tracked and organized into one group when they have similar identities in the MIT. According to the Grouping Theory (Yantis, 1992), the tracking targets’ initial formation and their location-based perceptual grouping influences the tracking performance of MOT. However, the tracking objects were usually processed and categorized based on the targets and nontargets’ identity similarity. The present article reviewed the relevant theories and hypothesis of location-based perceptual grouping in MOT and feature-based grouping in MIT. Then, we proposed the category-based grouping hypothesis which assumes that category-related information also helps the grouping in the MIT task. Several experiments have been proposed to examine the category-based grouping in the MIT task.

Key words: Multiple Identity Tracking, working memory, feature-based perceptual grouping, attentional resource assignment, eye movement