Watching chaos unfold: Asymmetries in attentional effort when moving towards order versus chaos

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballrooms

Skadi Gerkensmeier¹ (sgerkens@student.ubc.ca), Joan Danielle K. Ongchoco¹; ¹University of British Columbia

In perception, visual processing strives towards order, both in space (via object segmentation) and in time (via event segmentation). In physics, however, systems strive towards chaos, and the reverse—maintaining order—costs energy. Here we asked how this fundamental law of entropy manifests in visual processing, especially in how we attend to unfolding order or chaos. We turned to a curious phenomenon: the pendulum wave. It consists of a row of pendulums, swinging with identical amplitudes but monotonically increasing frequencies. The pendulums synchronize and desynchronize over time, resulting in momentary percepts of “order” (motion appearing as a coherent wave) and “chaos” (where coherent motion seems to disappear). We tracked attentional effort across continuously transitioning pendulum waves using a multiple object tracking task. The transitions went from order to chaos or chaos to order, and we presented sliding windows of the full transition with probes in the early, middle, or late parts of each window to capture performance over time. We found that tracking performance decreased over time, but this was influenced by the progression and direction of the transition. The transition from order-to-chaos disrupted performance early (compared to its chaos-to-order counterpart—and the unfolding chaos showed a stabilizing effect on performance as the animation progressed (which was not true for unfolding order). Thus, in perception, as in physics, the law of entropy seems to structure visual processing: while the loss of order can be disruptive, the resulting chaos may free up attentional resources, allowing for more flexible attention allocation.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Vision