Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The rich literature on multiple object tracking (MOT)conclusively demonstrates that humans are able to visuallytrack a small number of objects. There is considerably lessagreement on what perceptual and cognitive processes areinvolved. While it is clear that MOT is attentionallydemanding, various accounts of MOT performance centrallyinvolve pre-attentional mechanisms as well. In this paper wepresent an account of object tracking in the ARCADIAcognitive system that treats MOT as dependent upon both pre-attentive and attention-bound processes. We show that withminimal addition this model replicates a variety of corephenomena in the MOT literature and provides an algorithmicexplanation of human performance limitations.