Chaz Firestone
@chazfirestone
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Cognitive scientist @JohnsHopkins . 🇨🇦
Baltimore, MD
Joined April 2009
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So excited to share this work led by the brilliant + creative + powerful
@SholeiCroom
! Sholei has interests in perception, action, intuitive physics, and theory of mind, and somehow managed to combine all of them in this new project. 🎁🔁
One of these people is trying to figure out the number of objects in the box; the other is trying to figure out their shape. Can you tell who’s who? In a new
@PNASNews
paper with
@HanbeiZ
&
@chazfirestone
, we explore *epistemic action understanding*!
📜:
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All the balls are the same color — and that color is *brown*!
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The difference between saccades and smooth pursuit eye movements, as demonstrated by sticking gross plastic thingies on your eyeballs
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The Extinction Illusion: The left side and the right side have the same number of black dots
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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):
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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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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"
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really excited about this new paradigm for measuring trust in AI
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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
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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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I’ve made versions of this myself, but always in 2D. This 3D version is something else!!
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humans: adversarial examples show how brittle machine recognition is!
also humans: whoa look at this ostrich
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was reminded today of one of the all-time-great footnotes
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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:
Full data & code:
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Out today!
"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?
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sorry linguists, nice knowing you
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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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also 95% of machine learning
95% of having a significant other is pointing at every dog you see and saying “thats a dog”
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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
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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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Today in Intro Psych: “Top-down processing” in language and speech perception!
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Thanks mom!! ❤️
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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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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:
Full data & code:
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Q: "Concisely summarize the last decade of computer vision research"
A:
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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
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“The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
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laughed three separate times as it kept getting worse
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🎉! 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.
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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.
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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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Already blowing all his money on 🥑instead of saving up for a 🏠
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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!
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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!
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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"
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alexa, is 0.4% smaller than 0.06%?
For people under 60, coronavirus is LESS dangerous than the seasonal flu:
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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!
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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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…but what if the other guys are cats using lawyer filters?
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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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Self-driving humans fooled by adversarial attacks
A city in Denmark is playing a trick on drivers and cyclists to get them to slow down.
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“Working memory is not a natural kind”. Provocative new paper, many years in the making, by philosopher of psychology
@jgomezlavin
.
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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:
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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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getting the baby to sleep so that we can look at pictures of the baby
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two controversial CNN tweets, mere hours apart. this topic is radioactive
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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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thank you for including three sets of chopsticks but all that sushi is for me, actually
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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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how many likes does it take to get tenure asking for a friend
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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!
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Today I learned that Fodor himself is an independent source of the "dark room problem" — and that he (a) articulated it more pithily than anyone else, and (b) connected it to broader issues in the philosophy of science. Is there anything he can't do??
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Humans: Adversarial examples show how brittle machine recognition is! Human visual processing would never be led astray by small image perturbations or anomalous patches.
Also humans:
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"Seeing and speaking": In a new paper @ JEP:General, Zekun Sun uses 10000 user-recorded descriptions to discover a Goldilocks relationship between the information-theoretic 'description length' of a stimulus and the literal length of verbal descriptions! 👇
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This is clever! The “paradox of pedantry”. If you are able to correct someone for speaking improperly, you surely understood them in the first place. This literally begs the question: should we correct each other less times?
The who/whom distinction is the worst sufferer of what I like to call the paradox of pedantry: to correct someone, you must have understood what they meant
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What is the “purpose” of perception? And how might the answer to this question help us distinguish perception from other mental processes? In a new paper,
@ibphillips
and I explore these and related questions, inspired by
@De_dicto
’s new (& wonderful) book
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Does the Müller-Lyer illusion require seeing "carpentered corners", such that it's only a product of WEIRD societies? I'm seeing this idea mentioned today.
WEIRD-ness is *definitely* something to address in psych; but there's good reason to doubt this particular explanation…
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