01 · The Science

Multiple Object Tracking

A swarm of identical dots drifts at once — and you must hold a chosen few with your gaze alone.

Pylyshyn & Storm, 1988

Measures

Dynamically divided visual attention

Key regions

Parietal · frontal eye fields · occipito-temporal

Ages

7 and up

Trains

Submarine Track

01First, a disambiguation

"Multiple Object Tracking / MOT" can mean two very different things. This page is about the cognitive-science paradigm of visual attention — how people use attention to hold several moving targets at once. It is not the computer-vision MOT that tracks objects in video with algorithms (DeepSORT, ByteTrack, and the like).

02Origins

In the 1970s, cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn proposed that the mind has a set of "visual indexes" — a few invisible "pointers" that can lock onto and follow objects before you've even recognized them (the FINST theory). In 1988, he and Storm turned the idea into a measurable experiment with the MOT paradigm.

03How it works

A set of identical objects (typically 8 to 12) appears on screen. A few are briefly flagged as targets; then all of them drift along unpredictable paths for several seconds — targets and distractors weaving past one another, forcing you to keep updating their positions in mind. When motion stops, you must pick out which ones were the targets.

04What it measures

MOT indexes a dynamic, divisible kind of selective visual attention: spreading attention across several moving locations and sustaining it. That differs from fixating one target or switching between them, and it is closely tied to visual working memory.

05Where the brain works

Imaging consistently implicates a parietal–frontal–occipitotemporal network: the intraparietal sulcus (IPS), superior parietal lobule (SPL), frontal eye fields (FEF) and motion area MT+. Parietal activity grows with the number of tracked targets — a neural signature of attention's limited capacity.

06Key findings

Most people can track about four targets at once; performance doesn't collapse at a threshold but declines gradually as targets increase. There's a striking number–speed trade-off: faster objects are harder to track, and slowing them down can push the limit up toward eight — suggesting tracking draws on a flexibly allocated, limited resource rather than a fixed set of "slots."

07Where it's used

MOT is used in perceptual-cognitive training for athletes (3D-MOT / NeuroTracker; Faubert, 2013, found professional athletes learn such dynamic scenes unusually fast), concussion monitoring, cognitive aging and driving assessment, and basic research on divided attention. A caveat: whether such training transfers to real-world skill remains debated, and we don't overstate it.

From science to practice

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Authoritative sources for the facts on this page, plus further reading.