| Tracking Your Team
Reported December 2006
BACKGROUND: People can focus on more than three items at a time if those items share a common color. Psychologists at Johns Hopkins University have demonstrated that when players wear uniforms, it allows spectators, players and coaches at major sporting events to overcome humans' natural limit of tracking no more than three objects at a time. The common color of uniforms allows them to overcome the usual limit because they perceive separate individuals as a single set.
ABOUT THE STUDY: The Hopkins researchers asked undergraduate volunteers to view series of colored dots flashing onto a black computer screen for about one half second -- too fast to count the dots. The subjects were then asked to estimate the number of dots in one randomly selected set -- some of which contained as many as 35 dots -- on each trial. Half the time, the subjects were told in advance whether to pay attention to just the red dots, for example. Otherwise, the subjects were required to store as much information as possible in visual memory from what they saw briefly onscreen.
They found humans were unable to store information from more than three sets at once. However, dot counts were much more accurate when the given set contained three or fewer colors of dots.
The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.
If you would like more information, please contact:
Justin Halberda
Assistant Professor
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD
halberda@jhu.edu
Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
Santa Monica, CA 90406
(310) 394-1811
http://www.hfes.org
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