It is known that attention is important for the maintenance of accurate smooth pursuit of a moving object so I think that if the pursuit velocity is increased the attention level should also increase, but I am not 100% sure about it and I would love to get some feedback and suggestions of papers confirming one of these possibilities.
http://polorovereto.unitn.it/~turatto/pdf_papers/Turatto_2007_attention%20makes%20moving.pdf
Maybe this paper could help you.
First off, thanks to Pierpaolo for passing along the study. As for your question Nelson, there are some clarifications I would need from you before putting forward something beyond this post. By "pursuit", do you mean visual tracking? There are all kinds of studies on the mechanics of visual tracking, but the notion that the actual physical act of following the path of a moving object can somehow be "sped up" speaks more to the anticipatory set incorporated, as prediction takes over based on physical principles like gravity effect remaining constant.
The prediction sets (heuristics) used are an indication of the minds way of reducing cognitive load. This would be difficult to correlate with degree of focus, which I'd also need to confirm is what you mean by "increased attention level". From a 'volume of information processed' standpoint, the areas of the brain adept at chunking information that are in use, means you might compromise on some of the preciseness implied by velocity increase, in order to keep the thing you are tracking "in frame".
One of the interesting things the paper Pierpaolo passed along is the addressing of the phenomenological nature of moving objects generating neural processing that is different from processing that occurs when gathering information from stationary stimulus (see above, the difference between still frame and re-framing). So what you may encounter is not an elevation of attention volume (as in attention level), but first a categorization of attention based on stimulus type, and then a determination of attention required. Depending on your familiarity with the stimulus, a novel still frame may require more attention than a re-framing of a fast moving, but familiar (and predictable) moving object. As you may already be aware, that is the study of Receiver Operated Characteristics and I have some studies on the role that familiarity plays on awareness should that be of help. In the meantime, I've attached a study that may be of interest.
I believe this might be what you are looking after:
http://www.ski.org/SJHeinen_lab/documents/fovealattention.pdf
Heinen, Jin, Watamaniuk 2010:
"As the speed of stimuli increased, task performance decreased, which might be expected if more attention is required to pursue at higher speeds, but to our knowledge, this has not been shown in the literature."
You may want to check Scott N J Watamaniuk publications on Researchgate for the most recent information on this topic.
You'll find a few publications on shared attention during ocular pursuit under my profile too.
Thank you Piepaolo and Deans for your precious ideas and PDF. David Souto Thank you for your precious contribution. Please feel free to send me more stuff.!! It is more than welcomed!
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