Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present a computational model exploring goal-directeddeployment of attention during object tracking. Once selected,objects are tracked in parallel, but serial attention can bedirected to an object that is visually crowded and in danger ofbeing lost. An attended object’s future position can beextrapolated from its past motion trajectory, allowing theobject to be tracked even when it is briefly occluded. Usingthe model, we demonstrate that the difficulty of trackingthrough occlusions increases with the number of objectsbecause they compete for serial attention.