Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

How does cognition engage with the visual world? I make the case that multiple object tracking tasks isolate an object selection process that also applies to unmoving objects. Among other characteristics, the hemisphere specificity of object selection sets it apart from cognitive processing. Tracking is blind in that cognition generally does not know which tracked object is which. Contrary to a recent suggestion, this means that trackers do not function as the labeled pointers thought to be necessary to comprehend language or compute certain spatial relations. Instead, tracking has more in common with stimulus-driven attention, saliency, and featural attention.