Rapid recovery following disruptions in an attention-demanding task

Previous research demonstrates that people can track multiple moving objects through disruptions, including when all the objects disappear for a brief gap. It seems likely that it takes us time to resume the tracking task after such a gap, and our primary goal in this paper is to measure that time. We refer to it as the recovery time because participants are recovering from the gap. We report five experiments using the multiple object tracking task in which participants tracked a subset of moving identical stimuli through a brief gap. One stimulus was probed at variable delays following reappearance, and we measured reaction time (RT) to identify the probe as a target or distractor. We estimated recovery time using the RT-by-probe delay function, finding a value around 40 ms. To our knowledge, this is the first report measuring this duration. Additionally, we found that the recovery time is consistent across factors that are known to affect the difficulty of tracking and target identification. These findings constrain theories about how the visual system handles gaps in tracking. They also are consistent with the hypothesis that the visual system pauses the tracking task during a gap by storing task-relevant information offline, then reloading it after the gap.