Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
Chaz Firestone Profile picture
Chaz Firestone
@chazfirestone
Cognitive scientist studying how we see + think. Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences @JohnsHopkins (+ @JHUCogSci, @JHU_Philosophy). 🇨🇦
Dec 20, 2022 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
Is there a Language of Thought? Just one, or many? And over which cognitive systems does it hold? Happy to have been along for the ride on this new paper led by @Ericmandelbaum @quiltydunn @NicolasPorot, in many ways a companion to their 🧨 BBS article. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111… This is a shorter position piece, ft an all-star cast with views from development, social psych, vision science, linguistics, and the philosophy thereof: @yarrowdunham @RomanFeiman @danielwharris @levels_of @BenedekKurdi @myrtomylopoulos @PhilosophyShep @alexiswellwood & EJ Green
Mar 31, 2021 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
How do we perceive physical and social relations (e.g. two puzzle pieces fitting together, one person chasing another, or a vase teetering on a table)? @AlonHafri's new @TrendsCognSci review explores how automatic visual processing extracts high-level relations between objects 👇 The paper reviews recent work on visual processing of sophisticated relations, and it also taxonomizes (a) the relations themselves; (b) criteria for implicating automatic visual processing; & (c) the methodological innovations that have made it possible to study these phenomena
Mar 29, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Great question (& great answers in replies), but FWIW my sense is the opposite Q is often the limiting one. How many psych + neuro folks genuinely want to be in closer dialogue with philosophy? Like in a way that involves keeping up with latest work, following phil journals, &c? It strikes me that it’s just not many. Not sure who I’d be speaking for here (if anyone), but seems like the expectations are often asymmetric: scis expect phil colleagues to read & digest the latest research on the other side, often without taking on the same burden in return
Nov 25, 2020 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
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/

That would be cool! But (un)fortunately that's not what's going on. As @_OliSharpe, @wouterkool and others show in some follow-up demos, it's not about the arrows at all! 2/

Nov 23, 2020 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
Love this new @NatMachIntell perspective by @cameronjbuckner! Cameron connects adversarial examples to longstanding issues in epistemology and philosophy of science, especially the new riddle of induction; aka the "grue" problem (plato.stanford.edu/entries/goodma…). For Cameron, adv misclassification is an "artifact"—a pattern that carries real information but causes errors if misunderstood. If you hear a moving siren changing its pitch, you may be misled until you realize what's going on. (But once you do, the Doppler effect is v. useful!)
Oct 15, 2020 • 15 tweets • 9 min read
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/… Here's a thread with some of the key ideas 👇

(& here's a link to the paper with no paywall! perception.jhu.edu/files/PDFs/20_…)
Jul 23, 2020 • 10 tweets • 7 min read
The #DarkRoom discussion continues!

Our initial piece (which revived the problem and reviewed some solutions) now has replies from Karl Friston, @fluffycyborg, @anilkseth, Colin Klein, @sandervdc, @drclbuckley, @BerenMillidge, & @a_tschantz. We reply to them in turn. 🧵👇 If agents are just prediction-error minimizers, why don't they remain in highly predictable environments—like a dark, empty room? This is the Dark Room Problem. It's been around for a while, but some new work has revived it, as we note in a recent paper.

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Jun 19, 2020 • 8 tweets • 7 min read
Our lab is ready for Virtual-@VSSMtg! Check out these talks and posters by @ChenxiaooooGuan, @AlonHafri, @LittlestPat, @neuro_zz, @NartkerMakaela, Michael Lepori, Zekun Sun, Qian Yu, and special faculty guest Justin Halberda! Here's a bit more about what's on the menu. #VSS2020 Zekun has discovered a "Goldilocks" relationship between complexity & beauty. She generated shapes whose informational complexity could be measured objectively, then had subjects decide which makes a better "painting". Surprisingly, *moderately* complex ones were best! #VSS2020
Jun 14, 2019 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
All the balls are the same color — and that color is *brown*! Maybe the strongest color illusion I have ever seen, courtney of @NovickProf
Dec 7, 2018 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
How can we separate changes to *perception itself* from changes to higher-level judgments and responses? Our latest work (preprint @ perception.jhu.edu/color) introduces a new approach to this deep & difficult problem, by exploring various "memory color" effects as a case study. Memory color effects are said to occur when the known color of an object changes how it visually appears. For example, a gray banana might appear to be a bit yellow, or an orange heart might appear redder than it really is, because we know what color they're *supposed* to be.