Cognitive scientist @JohnsHopkins. 🇨🇦 also: bsky.app/profile/chazfiresto…
Baltimore, MD
- Tweets 9,300
- Following 942
- Followers 19,970
- Likes 16,857
Pinned Tweet
Well this is exciting!
The Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at @JohnsHopkins invites applications for a full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty member in Cognitive Psychology, in any area and at any rank!
Application + more info: apply.interfolio.com/178146
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The difference between saccades and smooth pursuit eye movements, as demonstrated by sticking gross plastic thingies on your eyeballs
tiktok.com/t/ZTRgxwHJG/
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The Extinction Illusion: The left side and the right side have the same number of black dots
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs…
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“Escher sentences” are sentences that seem fine at first, but on reflection have no stable interpretation, just like Escher’s paintings.
For example, “More people have been to Russia than I have”.
An amazing and puzzling class of sentences, and a cool paper exploring them!
More than 10 years in the making... my paper on "Escher sentences", aka comparative illusions, is now online at Journal of Semantics (w @ColinPhillips2, R. Pancheva and V. Hacquard): academic.oup.com/jos/advance…
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The three stages of acceptance in academia:
(1) that’s false
(2) that’s trivial
(3) I thought of it first
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What are the odds that some Presbyterian minister born in 1701 came up with the right way to think about probability? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable.
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Maybe the strongest color illusion I have ever seen, courtney of @NovickProf
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Absolute 🔥 from @yael_niv:
"Behavioral, rather than neuroscientific research, is essential for understanding the brain, contrary to the opinion of prominent funding bodies and scientific journals, who erroneously place neural data on a pedestal"
psyarxiv.com/y8mxe/
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I'm getting e-mails about this lovely new illusion that appears to show cognitive penetration of perception! Could it really be that these little arrows completely change our perception of motion and size? 1/
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Dear Twitter,
How badly have you misspelled your own name in emails to your senior colleagues?
Sincerely,
Chax
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2.5yo toddler, referring to 2.5mo baby:
“He knows how to talk, he just can’t do it yet”
…I think we’re raising a Chomskyan?
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jeff bezos literally becoming dr. octopus is a bit too on the nose
Nothing against @JeffBezos but this is the stuff of evil genius villians 🙃
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Zenon Pylyshyn (1937-2022) has passed away. A titan in the field of cognitive science, he made foundational contributions to our understanding of perception, attention, and imagery, and was a major influence in the development (and defense) of the Computational Theory of Mind.
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If you have normal visual imagery, imagining a bright stimulus makes your pupils constrict.
But if you have aphantasia, that doesn’t happen.
Some of the best evidence out there that it’s not just “people talking past each other”.
doi.org/10.7554/eLife.72484
Until someone can design an experiment that can reliably distinguish between people with "aphantasia" and those without it, I'm going to continue to think that it's just people talking past each other.
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humans: adversarial examples show how brittle machine recognition is!
also humans: whoa look at this ostrich
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You can see where you are looking! This image by @AkiyoshiKitaoka lets you see your own eye movements, which create a little light-gray 'spotlight' wherever you point your eyes. The spotlight isn't really there; your mind is making it!
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Humans can decipher adversarial images! Our new work (out TODAY in @NatureComms) shows that people can do "theory of mind" on machines—predicting how machines will see the bizarre images that "fool" them.
Paper: nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
Full data & code: perception.jhu.edu/cnndata
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Out today! pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.23…
"The perception of silence" -- now in press at @PNASNews! In this new paper, Rui Zhe Goh, @chazfirestone, and I take a novel empirical approach to an age-old philosophical question: Do we only hear sounds? Or do we also (literally) hear silence? philpapers.org/rec/RUITPO-4
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sorry linguists, nice knowing you
sciencetimes.com/amp/article…
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Reading a book a week in 2023. Here’s what January looks like:
- The very hungry caterpillar by Eric Carle
- Penguins love their ABCs by Sarah Aspinal
- Curious George and the Pizza by Margaret and H.A Rey
- Goodnight Gorilla by Peggy Rathman
(I have a toddler not a podcast)
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Some people claim no visual imagery (aphantasia); they can't create pictures in their minds. But how can we really tell? This new 📃 shows that, whereas ppl with imagery show pupillary responses to imagined light, aphantasics don't! So clever & fascinating
elifesciences.org/articles/7…
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Why does it take you so long to figure out what’s going on this image? Your visual system is constantly on the lookout for *faces* and gets stuck on spurious configurations.
(hint: rotate your display!)
h/t @UofGCSPE
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Did you know that colloquium norms wildly differ in psychology vs philosophy? I recently spoke to a philosophy department (but w/ several psychologists in attendance), so I decided to warn everyone before proceeding.
(curious now whether folks agree that these are the norms…)
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Thanks mom!! ❤️
Our amazing son @chazfirestone is now a tenured professor @JohnsHopkins. We love you! xoxo
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people i don't have a soundcloud to promote but i think our lab's work is cool, maybe you will too?
Humans can decipher adversarial images! Our new work (out TODAY in @NatureComms) shows that people can do "theory of mind" on machines—predicting how machines will see the bizarre images that "fool" them.
Paper: nature.com/articles/s41467-0…
Full data & code: perception.jhu.edu/cnndata
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Control your perception with your breath
h/t @kimberlyquinn nitter.app/kimberlyquinn/status/1…
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Humans and machines often behave differently on the same task. But which differences are deep & enduring, and which are only superficial? In a new paper, I suggest an approach for finding out, drawing on insights from comparative & developmental psychology pnas.org/content/early/2020/…
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ᗯᗩᔕIᖴ ᗰEᕼᗰOOᗪ
“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
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Gavin Buckingham
🎉! Honored to join this group, and grateful to mentors + collaborators + peers + mentees for making it possible!
Congratulations to @chazfirestone, who has been named a Rising Star by @PsychScience! 🌠 The award recognizes researchers whose innovative work has already advanced the field and signals great potential for their continued contributions.
ALT Portrait of JHU assistant professor Chaz Firestone smiling, brown hair and blue button down shirt, blurred white board with red, black, and blue writing in background
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Can you voluntarily produce a "rumbling" sound in your own ears? I can, and once thought everyone could! But no: Only some people can voluntarily control their tensor tympani, which dampens loud sounds by tensing up the eardrum.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tensor…
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when your code is hacky but still gets the job done nitter.app/KidzareCrazzy/status/1…
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🥳🎉🍾! Excited for all the work we'll do with the @NSF's support.
Congratulations to @chazfirestone and his lab, who have been awarded an @NSF grant to study how we see relations between objects.
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Stare at a single point in this image for 10s, and your mind will *erase* it. A mental GIF!
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This week in #IntroPsych: interpreting (and misinterpreting) neuroimaging data in psychology
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So happy to welcome Baby Boy #2 into our family! @RTheise & Baby are healthy and resting up. #1 is already smitten with his little brother, and used their first facetime together to sing the new song he’s been practicing, titled “hello baby hello baby”.
❤️, the Theiserstones
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what if what you see as red, i see as blue? has anyone thought about this before, i just came up with it
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NBA Shane
Do people who know more color words process colors differently? This new paper in @PNASNews offers a nuanced answer: The more color words you know, the better you remember the colors you see — but you don't literally see them any better!
pnas.org/content/early/2020/…
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Can we truly perceive silence? Or only cognitively infer it? Check out this story on Rui Zhe Goh's new paper (w/ me + @ibphillips) on this old philosophical question.
Thanks @BeeBrookshire for writing a great piece—and be sure to try the embedded demos!
nytimes.com/2023/07/10/scien…
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Human faces are located faster than inanimate objects in visual search. But what about objects that have illusory faces hiding in them? Do they behave like real faces?
Yes! "A visual search advantage for illusory faces in objects"
link.springer.com/article/10…
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it makes more sense when you realize there’s also a 480% chance of not getting pregnant
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Planning online lectures? This is a little mind-blowing. Students engage less with longer vids; not so surprising. What's surprising is it's "less" in *absolute* terms, not just relative terms: 6min vids get ~5mins of attention—but >12min vids get ~3mins! blog.edx.org/optimal-video-l…
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half of the people you think of as your friend don't think of you as their friend 😢
journals.plos.org/plosone/ar…
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Out today! nature.com/articles/s41562-0…
Looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we see not only its content (a French village beneath a night sky) but also its *style*. How does that work? How do we see style?
In @NatureHumBehav, @chazfirestone & I take an experimental approach to style perception! osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/j7…
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Nice! I predict that "cognitive architecture" will "go viral" — a term I just came up with for spreading quickly and widely across social media platforms
🧠What is a "cognitive architecture"?
This is a term I've been using a bunch recently. All credit for coming up with it goes to @Altimor
I tried to write down a bit what exactly I mean by this and how to think about and explore different options here
blog.langchain.dev/what-is-a…
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How well does my lab know me? Well enough to surprise me with tenure onions on half a dozen cream cheese + lox bagels, that’s how much
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Me: "I wish I could write like Jerry Fodor"
Jerry Fodor: "What makes Wheaties the breakfast of champions? … it would appear that General Mills has either misused the method of differences or committed the fallacy of affirmation of the consequent"
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I am delighted to announce that @ericmandelbaum has been awarded the @socphilpsych's 2023 Stanton Prize! The prize is given to a young scholar who has made significant contributions to interdisciplinary research and been active in the SPP. Please join me in congratulating Eric!
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“Working memory is not a natural kind”. Provocative new paper, many years in the making, by philosopher of psychology @jgomezlavin.
link.springer.com/article/10…
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Awesome example, but I'm tempted to interpret it a bit differently: the system making this error may well be capturing human perception accurately (we also 'see' a 5m cow!) but human cognition poorly (we know that can't be what it is). Which process is it supposed to be modeling?
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Things that happen in my home country (🇨🇦) that would never happen in my adopted country (🇺🇸): The leaders of the major political parties, days before a federal election, uniting for a pro-science, pro-health message:
Annamie Paul
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At the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science (@RutgersCCS) today to talk about perceiving absences. Always a little intimidating to visit such a storied CogSci institution, so I found the perfect motivation video to pump me up 🚫🦒
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“It’s OK daddy, that happens sometimes”
- toddler, seeing the despair on my face after he jumped in a mud puddle as we were getting in the car
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cover the middle of the image and it will appear to speed up; cover the outsides and it will appear to slow down
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Response time (eg between stimulus & keypress) is a ubiquitous measure in cognitive psychology. But what about response *duration* (how long you held the key)? A new paper explores this measure as a relatively untapped well of psychological insight. Cool! journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.…
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Interestingasfuck