Abstract

The Multiple-object tracking task (MOT) is a task in which participants track the movement of some targets out of the randomly moving stimuli. In order to successfully perform MOT, attention should be assigned to the targets. There has been controversy over whether information of the distractors affects MOT performance. The current study focused on MOT performance when the perceptual organization between targets and distractors interferes with the attentional allocation on the targets. We manipulated the ratio of targets and distractors constituting a perceptually organized group by sharing the same movement according to the common fate law (target-distractor respectively 5-0, 4-1, 3-2, 2-3, 1-4, 0-5), and checked whether MOT performance was changed according to the manipulation. As a result, compared to when grouped by targets alone, the conditions in which targets and distractors were grouped together showed relatively lower tracking accuracy. However, when grouped by distractors alone, high accuracy was found. These results indicate that perceptional grouping affects MOT performance by capturing attention, and that even one of distractors negatively affects MOT performance if it is grouped perceptually by targets.