Target Tracker

There are many situations throughout our lives where we need to be able to divide our visual attention and track multiple objects. When you’re driving through a busy intersection, how well can you track other cars, pedestrians, and everything else moving around you? Or if you’re playing a sport, how well can you keep your eye on the ball and the other players all at once?

In each of these situations, the ability to divide your visual attention and track multiple objects is a requirement.

Target Tracker is one of the exercises from BrainHQ’s Attention category. Your task in Target Tracker is to keep track of several target objects as they move around the screen while ignoring other distracting objects.

Here’s how the exercise works:

1. A few target objects—bubbles, puffer fish, or jellyfish—appear on the screen and start to move around. Focus on following these objects as they move around.
   
2. More “distractor” objects are added to the screen (more bubbles, puffer fish, or jellyfish) and will also move around. After a while, all of the objects on screen will stop moving.
   
3. Select the original target objects.
   

If you answer correctly you’ll hear a “boop” sound, and you may be tasked with tracking more objects than before. If you answer incorrectly you’ll hear a “bonk” sound, you’ll see the correct answer on screen and the number of objects you’ll be tasked with tracking may be reduced. In both cases the level then continues, repeating from Step 1 above.

You can review the exercise video tutorial video below:

Target Tracker Demo from BrainHQ from Posit Science on Vimeo.

As you advance through Target Tracker, it gets harder in these ways:

• The objects travel more quickly, for longer amounts of time, and over larger areas.
• The contrast between the objects and the background decreases, making it harder to track the targets.