took me like 4-5 tries to get #15 down

isnt this more to do with our eyes than our brains? like the amount of frames per second that constitutes movement to us

I got all 4 at 15 on my second try...

Anyone else go 1,2,15?

Wayne Gretzky could handle twelve objects moving at high speeds - (ten players, one goalie at a time, and one puck). It's what made him so great. There are always exceptions, and expect gamers to break the limits just as often as atheletes. Y'know, per capita.

"I wish that I could put such a speed into real world context"

[ 0.15 m/s x 100cm/m x 1in/2.54cm x 1mile/63360in x 60s/min x 60min/hr ]

0.15 m/s = 0.3355 miles per hour (mph)

; )

.15 meters/second ~ 6 inches/second ~ 30 feet/minute ~ 0.34 miles/hour

@TheCakeIsALie: you beat me to it, but my list is more complete

Can't do 4 moving things at same time. Brain hurt... Should try things like this early in day not now. Brain hurt! Ow! I think I'll lie down....

I like jjpember's formula better.

@jjpember: Haha, I win by mere seconds :P

But I had more decimal places, and we all know that's what really counts.

^_^

isn't the speed related to the size of the area in which you are tracking? bigger area, lfaster speed, more likely to track for a longer period of time?

so this speed means nothing in real world context, because you could track people walking around a big open room at speeds in excess of 1 mph. certainly i can track more than one person walking (crawling) around at .3 mph

it's all relative.

Interesting...

Translating it into mph is pointless. Heck, having it in meters per second is pointless. The only speed that matters is angular speed relative to our eyes.

I have no problem tracking a jet flying a couple hundred miles per hour, but that's because it's very far away from me and appears to be moving slowly. 0.15 m/s at what distance? .5 - 1 meter? Back up a little and you can track much faster things.

@TheCakeIsALie: and @jjpember: he wanted a real world example of something that typically moves at that speed :p not a metric to imperial conversion

I had no trouble with any of these. Even tracking the four at speed 15. I'd like to try tracking eight.

no wonder i can't break a million in geometry wars...

@nolifedopestar: Then I guess we BOTH lose. :P

@TheCakeIsALie: lol cookies each for effort though

Anyone else not having the test site work properly?

It loads, but then there is no blink and no movement.

Problem with this test is the framerate, maybe its my monitor setting.

I can track 4 at 10 no sweat, I tried 15 next and the framerate is so bad that the balls split into lines of four balls and when they pass one another they overlap.

@Tonx:

I doubt Wayne Gretzky can actually track that many objects at once. This test requires tracking mainly in peripheral vision by concentrating your vision on one object and concentrating on paying attention to where the other objects are. Moving your eyes back and forth allows greater cognition of your surroundings. A combination of skill and knowledge of predicting how plays are constructed and changing your vision's focus every so often to refresh sets of objects can lend to better tracking of more objects.

Not all gamers will always be able to track so many objects. Any skill can be improved with training, but genetics still determines the heightened limit of that training and how effective such training would be. Still, it would be interesting to see if scientists were to take some of the top gamers and test their tracking abilities.

Apparently researchers have never heard of Imperishable Night. :)

Woo! I got 15 on my first try for all 4! Which is strange, because it took three tries for the test before it. I jumped past many of the middle ones, so the lack of progression to that speed may have played a factor.

Or it could be a trick to weed out liers and those weren't actually the ones that blinked, in which case I missed it, but I still feel accomplished having quasi-completed the test.

I think I could track more than 8 at a speed like 1, though. I'm interested to try, even if just to be dizzied by the number of moving dots there would have to be on screen for such a test.

I got 15 on the single on my first try but (I went 1 > 7 > 15) but I seemed to have capped out around 10 on the 4 targets at once thing.

play a few japanese shmups and see how many dots you can track.

My computer monitor at work isn't big enough to fit the entire test area on the screen... I'll have to try it at home.

Meh. Figured it out.

It ran smoothly, but I still manage all four on 15 first try. Didn't even try the other speed levels.

I want to try eight. That, or give me faster speeds.

Okay. Figured it out. Press 'play'.

At least my confidence is boosted since I did

1, 15 then 4, 15.

Got both right first try.

I was expecting more, to be honest.

It's hard when your browser's area is smaller than the screen.

Guess that ruins my idea for the game "1000 moving dots on screen that you must follow"

...back to the drawing board...

@kwant:

Yea def.

Tracked 4 on 15 in one try. Thank you GigaWing Generations and the Touhou/Shanghai Alice Games

"I got 15 on my first try."

Here's a cookie, you inadequate prick.

Seriously, I have this step brother either is or thinks he is good at everything. He also has an incessant need to state his superiority at everything when he has the chance... and ESPECIALLY when no one cares.

I got...oh look a bird..what was i saying again? anyway my eye's suck so i can't track em all on the first few tries

This was an interesting test. Now makes sense why when I'm playing something like Halo and I hit a heavy fire zone I get blind sided by a shot by someone I saw. Too busy tracking other threats even though I know there are other imminent ones. Maybe that's a bad analogy? Makes sense to me!

Otherwise interesting find guys.

I couldn't do this test properly because my brain kept wanting to dodge that little crosshair out of the way of getting smashed by dots...too many bullet-hell shooters here.

@onikuwagata: Yeah, I've got that problem too right now at work. I can do 1 dot fine on all speeds so long as I scroll, but 4 is impossible since some can go high and low at the same time.

Okay I can't get past 3 on the easy one, maybe this is why I suck at videogames.

Though I think it seems really difficult because the balls don't move in smoothe paths, they keep jumping around occasionally.

@kwant: Hard to compare that, bullethell games the shots are always using a pattern, which make it easy to calculate and follow.

reminds me of japanese bullet hells as well =P why are they so much fun?

Wait.

People are competing for high scores on a statistical testing program?

Oooh, gamers.

i'm running on 21 year old hardware, gods i need an upgrade, that's almost as old as Atari :(

@SolCutter:

Or any Cave stuff for that matter. I'd be interested to see what results they'd get from this test if they performed it on a world class bullet hell shmupper.

@Vexorg:

No doubt.

8 moving objects...
Tell that to Ikaruga.

Whenever I think of tracking stuff with peripheral vision, I'm reminded of this spell card from Imperishable Night.

[www.youtube.com]

I hate that spell card so much.

@SirDanF:
"...genetics still determines the heightened limit of that training and how effective such training would be."

SirDanF, did you read the researchers,(George Alvarez & Steven Franconeri), published papers?

"The current study represents a challenge to the hypothesis that the number of objects that can be tracked is a fixed number, set by an architectural constraint...

Previous experiments have shown that observers can track a maximum of about 4 moving objects. A natural explanation for this capacity limit is that the visual system is architecturally limited to handling a fixed number of objects at once...In contrast to this view, Experiment 1 shows that tracking capacity is not fixed...Experiment 2 suggests that that the limit on tracking is related to the spatial resolution of attention. Combined, these results suggest that the number of objects that can be tracked depends on a flexibly allocated resource, and that allocating more resources to tracking a particular object increases the precision with which that object is selected...which has important implications for the mechanisms of object tracking and for the relationship between object tracking and other cognitive processes...These findings are consistent with the more general claim that attentional processing is not limited to a fixed number of items (Davis, Welch, Holmes, & Shepherd, 2001; Davis, 2004; Tripathy & Barret, 2004; Tripathy, Narasimhan, & Barret, 2007)."
-[cvcl.mit.edu]).pdf

The more research that gets done shows the previous belief that tracking capacity is pre-set by bodily limitations is false.

@KLASHE said exactly what I had in mind. Ikaruga.

And all those clowns in circus that juggle zillions of things ;-)

I went 1,10,15 on one ball and got all of them easily without looking away from the cross. Then I went to 15 on four balls and managed to track two, then I went to 10 and managed to track them easily so I went to 12, found out it was broken so I went to 13 and so