Department of Behavioral Neurology, Leibnitz Institute for Neurobiology, Magdeburg, Germany
Mircea Ariel Schoenfeld
Department of Neurology, Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany; Department of Behavioral Neurology, Leibnitz Institute for Neurobiology, Magdeburg, Germany; Kliniken Schmieder, Heidelberg, Germany
Jens-Max Hopf
Department of Neurology, Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany; Department of Behavioral Neurology, Leibnitz Institute for Neurobiology, Magdeburg, Germany
The visual system has evolved the ability to track features like color and orientation in parallel. This property aligns with the specialization of processing these feature dimensions in the visual cortex. But what if we ask to track changing feature-values within the same feature dimension? Parallel tracking would then have to share the same cortical representation, which would set strong limitations on tracking performance. We address this question by measuring the precision of color representations when human observers track the color of two superimposed dot clouds that simultaneously change color along independent trajectories in color-space. We find that tracking precision is highly imbalanced between streams and that tracking precision changes over time by alternating between streams at a rate of ~1 Hz. These observations suggest that, while parallel color tracking is possible, it is highly limited, essentially allowing for only one color-stream to be tracked with precision at a given time.
