Abstract
Multiple-object tracking (MOT) involves tracking the positions of several targets as they move among identical distractors. When we consider situations in everyday life that require MOT such as team sports or driving, they often require performing coordinated actions towards specific items in these dynamic environments (e.g. pointing, touching). Further, MOT is thought to employ cognitive mechanisms that are necessary for performing coordinated actions towards tracked items (Pylyshyn, 2001). In support of this, visually guided touch was found to interfere with the MOT task, especially when the touched item was a distractor in MOT as compared to a target (Terry & Trick, 2021). In the present study we sought out to investigate if this advantage for touching targets vs. distractors was simply due to a processing benefit for targets (i.e. faster to process change on tracked items) or if it was driven by action preparation (i.e. target tracking facilitating creation of action plans for targets but not distractors). We investigated this using a modified MOT task where participants performed two tasks at once: 1) track targets in MOT and 2) respond when any item in MOT changes colour. Participants respond to colour changes by pressing a button or touching the item that changed colour as fast as they can, depending on the condition. Critically, the time to touch or button press for targets vs. distractors that change colour inform the mechanism responsible for the touch target benefit. Participants were always faster to respond to changes on targets vs. distractors, however the difference between targets and distractors was much larger when the response involved touching vs. pressing a button. These results support the contention that tracking targets in MOT facilitates action preparation, providing evidence of a shared mechanism employed in tracking and visually guided actions.