How do we track what we don't see? Spatiotemporal information in multiple object tracking

Dynamic environments require us to visually track and maintain moving objects through space and across occlusions. The goal of the current research was to investigate the encoding and recovery of spatiotemporal elements in a multiple object tracking (MOT) paradigm. This research looked at the encoding and recovery of motion cues after occlusions to assess which spatiotemporal information is encoded, how this information is used during the occlusion, and which spatiotemporal elements impact the recovery of targets. Additionally, the impact of encoding specificity, or a lack thereof, between encoding and recovery was assessed for its impact on recovery.;The findings of this thesis confirm that location information is a salient piece of information in MOT. The results suggest that direction information is also encoded in MOT. Traditional MOT paradigms may have failed to demonstrate the use of direction cues because of the lack of encoding specify (or at least partial encoding specify) between the tracking and recovery phases. Overall, the theoretical contribution of this thesis is that target recovery after occlusion is facilitated by an off-line backward extrapolation. It is possible that stable spatiotemporal information such as direction information may be stored in long-term memory, while information that is dynamic and requires constant update, such as location-identity bindings, is stored in visual short-term memory.;Experiment 1 investigated the impact of having motion in both tracking and recovery phases of MOT. Motion facilitated recovery of targets that moved during the occlusion, highlighting the importance of motion encoding and the use of motion in recovery. Experiment 2 investigated the impact of having only direction information in the recovery phase on target recovery. Experiment 2 showed that direction information significantly improved performance in recovering targets that moved during the occlusion period. Experiment 3 examined location, direction, and motion information in both the tracking and recovery phase in order to determine the impact of having such information during tracking on recovery accuracy. The results of this experiment showed that the presence of spatiotemporal information in the tracking phase was required for accurate recovery of targets.