Short Article: Sequential Tapping Interferes Selectively with Multiple-Object Tracking: Do Finger-Tapping and Tracking Share a Common Resource?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Multiple-object tracking involves simultaneously monitoring positions of a number of target items as they move among distractors. Young adults are capable of tracking only 3-5 items at once. In this study we investigated the origin of this limitation by looking for secondary tasks that interfere with tracking. We compared tracking performance (baseline condition), with performance when participants tapped three fingers in a specific order while tracking (sequential tapping) or articulated three syllables in a specific order while tracking (sequential articulation). The articulation task was used to ensure that the interference produced by sequential tapping was more than would be expected by the executive demands of carrying out any two "attention-demanding" tasks at once. Even though sequential tapping does not require vision or memorizing the positions of external items, it produced significantly more interference than did sequential articulation, as might be expected if tracking and sequential tapping shared a common (limited) resource.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".