Chaz Firestone

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Verified

Chaz verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• Ph.D.
• Professor (Associate) at Johns Hopkins University

The relation between attention, perception and awareness is among the most fundamental problems in the science of the mind. One of the most striking and well-known phenomena bearing on this question is inattentional blindness (IB; Neisser & Becklen, 1975; Mack & Rock, 1998; Most et al., 2001, 2005). In IB, naïve observers fail to report clearly vis...

A fundamental question in the psychological sciences is the degree to which culture shapes core cognitive processes — perhaps none more foundational than how we perceive the world around us. A dramatic and oft-cited “case study” of culture’s power in this regard is the Müller-Lyer illusion, which depicts two lines of equal length but with arrowhead...

The relation between attention, perception and awareness is among the most fundamental problems in the science of the mind. One of the most striking and well-known phenomena bearing on this question is inattentional blindness (IB; Neisser & Becklen, 1975; Mack & Rock, 1998; Most et al., 2001, 2005). In IB, naïve observers fail to report clearly vis...

The relation between attention, perception and awareness is among the most fundamental problems in the science of the mind. One of the most striking and well-known phenomena bearing on this question is inattentional blindness (IB; Neisser & Becklen, 1975; Mack & Rock, 1998; Most et al., 2001, 2005). In IB, naïve observers fail to report clearly vis...

Whereas decades of research have cataloged striking errors in physical reasoning, a resurgence of interest in intuitive physics has revealed humans’ remarkable ability to successfully predict the unfolding of physical scenes. A leading interpretation intended to resolve these opposing results is that physical reasoning recruits a general-purpose me...

When a piece of fruit is in a bowl, and the bowl is on a table, we appreciate not only the individual objects and their features, but also the relations containment and support, which abstract away from the particular objects involved. Independent representation of roles (e.g., containers vs. supporters) and “fillers” of those roles (e.g., bowls vs...

The relation between attention, perception and awareness is among the most fundamental problems in the science of the mind. One of the most striking and well-known phenomena bearing on this question is inattentional blindness (IB; Neisser & Becklen, 1975; Mack & Rock, 1998; Most et al., 2001, 2005). In IB, naïve observers fail to report clearly vis...

When representing high-level stimuli, such as faces and animals, we tend to emphasize salient features—such as a face’s prominent cheekbones or a bird’s pointed beak. Such mental caricaturing leaves traces in memory, which exaggerates these distinctive qualities. How broadly does this phenomenon extend? Here, in six experiments ( N = 700 adults), w...

Feigning ignorance is crucial in contexts as diverse as diplomacy, warcraft and personal relationships, each demanding strategic concealment of information. To be effective, such ‘epistemic pretense’ requires us to anticipate how we would behave with different knowledge, and then to act in accord with that counterfactual knowledge state. Decades of...

A writer seeks connections between consciousness and fundamental physics

Many actions have instrumental aims, in which we move our bodies to achieve a physical outcome in the environment. However, we also perform actions with epistemic aims, in which we move our bodies to acquire information and learn about the world. A large literature on action recognition investigates how observers represent and understand the former...

Quilty-Dunn et al.'s wide-ranging defense of the Language of Thought Hypothesis (LoTH) argues that vision traffics in abstract, structured representational formats. We agree: Vision, like language, is compositional – just as words compose into phrases, many visual representations contain discrete constituents that combine in systematic ways. Here,...

Sometimes we look but fail to see: our car keys on a cluttered desk, a repeated word in a carefully proofread email, or a motorcycle at an intersection. Wolfe and colleagues present a unifying, mechanistic framework for understanding these “Looked But Failed to See” errors, explaining how such misses arise from natural constraints on human visual p...

Auditory perception is traditionally conceived as the perception of sounds-a friend's voice, a clap of thunder, a minor chord. However, daily life also seems to present us with experiences characterized by the absence of sound-a moment of silence, a gap between thunderclaps, the hush after a musical performance. In these cases, do we positively hea...

Perception is our primary means of accessing the external world. What is the nature of this core mental process? Although this question is at the center of scientific research on perception, it has also long been explored by philosophers, who ask fundamental questions about our capacity to perceive: Do our different senses represent the world in co...

Machine recognition systems now rival humans in their ability to classify natural images. However, their success is accompanied by a striking failure: a tendency to commit bizarre misclassifications on inputs specifically selected to fool them. What do ordinary people know about the nature and prevalence of such classification errors? Here, five ex...

A philosopher explores perception and cognition.

When a circular coin is rotated in depth, is there any sense in which it comes to resemble an ellipse? While this question is at the center of a rich and divided philosophical tradition (with some scholars answering affirmatively and some negatively), Morales et al. (2020, 2021) took an empirical approach, reporting 10 experiments whose results fav...

Perception is our primary means of accessing the external world. What is the nature of this core mental process? Although this question is at the center of scientific research on perception, it has also long been explored by philosophers, who ask fundamental questions about our capacity to perceive: Do our different senses represent the world in co...

“What is the structure of thought?” is as central a question as any in cognitive science. A classic answer to this question has appealed to a Language of Thought (LoT). We point to emerging research from disparate branches of the field that supports the LoT hypothesis, but also uncovers diversity in LoTs across cognitive systems, stages of developm...

A plain, blank canvas does not look very beautiful; to make it aesthetically appealing requires adding structure and complexity. But how much structure is best? In other words, what is the relationship between beauty and complexity? It has long been hypothesized that complexity and beauty meet at a “sweet spot,” such that the most beautiful images...

Manipulating an object in one’s mind has long been thought to mirror physically manipulating that object in allocentric three-dimensional space. A new study revises and clarifies this foundational assumption, identifying a previously unknown role for the observer’s point-of-view.

When a circular coin is rotated in depth, is there any sense in which it comes to resemble an ellipse? While this question is at the center of a rich and divided philosophical tradition (with some scholars answering affirmatively and some negatively), Morales et al. (2020, 2021a) took an empirical approach, reporting 10 experiments whose results fa...

The rise of machine-learning systems that process sensory input has brought with it a rise in comparisons between human and machine perception. But such comparisons face a challenge: Whereas machine perception of some stimulus can often be probed through direct and explicit measures, much of human perceptual knowledge is latent, incomplete, or unav...

When a log burns, it transforms from a block of wood into a pile of ash. Such state changes are among the most dramatic ways objects change, going beyond mere changes of position or orientation. How does the mind represent changes of state? A foundational result in visual cognition is that memory extrapolates the positions of moving objects-a disto...

A plain, blank canvas doesn’t look very beautiful; to make it aesthetically appealing requires adding structure and complexity. But how much structure is best? In other words, what is the relationship between beauty and complexity? It has long been hypothesized that complexity and beauty meet at a “sweet spot”, such that the most beautiful images a...

1. Introduction What is the purpose of perception? And how might the answer to this question help distinguish perception from other mental processes? Block’s landmark book, The Border Between Seeing and Thinking, investigates the nature of perception, how perception differs from cognition and why the distinction matters. It is, as one would expect,...

Significance The recent emergence of deepfake videos raises theoretical and practical questions. Are humans or the leading machine learning model more capable of detecting algorithmic visual manipulations of videos? How should content moderation systems be designed to detect and flag video-based misinformation? We present data showing that ordinary...

What is the relationship between complexity in the world and complexity in the mind? Intuitively, increasingly complex objects and events should give rise to increasingly complex mental representations (or perhaps a plateau in complexity after a certain point). However, a counterintuitive possibility with roots in information theory is an inverted-...

Impossible figures represent the world in ways it cannot be. From the work of M. C. Escher to any popular perception textbook, such experiences show how some principles of mental processing can be so entrenched and inflexible as to produce absurd and even incoherent outcomes that could not occur in reality. Surprisingly, however, such impossible ex...

Morales, Bax, and Firestone (2020) reported that rotated circular objects compete for attention with head-on elliptical objects, and on this basis argued that some perspectivally shared aspect of their shape appearance is psychologically represented. Since then, a robust secondary discussion has emerged, often with suggestions for follow-up experim...

The recent emergence of deepfake videos leads to an important societal question: how can we know if a video that we watch is real or fake? In three online studies with 15,016 participants, we present authentic videos and deepfakes and ask participants to identify which is which. We compare the performance of ordinary participants against the leadin...

When a log burns, it transforms from a block of wood into a pile of ash. Such state-changes are among the most dramatic ways objects change, going beyond mere changes of position or orientation. How does the mind represent changes of state? A foundational result in visual cognition is that memory extrapolates the positions of moving objects—a disto...

In addition to seeing objects that are directly in view, we also represent objects that are merely implied (e.g., by occlusion, motion, and other cues). What can imply the presence of an object? Here, we explored (in three preregistered experiments; N = 360 adults) the role of physical interaction in creating impressions of objects that are not act...

Some things look more complex than others. For example, a crenulate and richly organized leaf may seem more complex than a plain stone. What is the nature of this experience-and why do we have it in the first place? Here, we explore how object complexity serves as an efficiently extracted visual signal that the object merits further exploration. We...

The world contains not only objects and features (red apples, glass bowls, wooden tables), but also relations holding between them (apples contained in bowls, bowls supported by tables). Representations of these relations are often developmentally precocious and linguistically privileged; but how does the mind extract them in the first place? Altho...

The study of visual memory is typically concerned with an image’s content: How well, and with what precision, we can recall which objects, people, or features we have seen in the past. But images also vary in their quality: The same object or scene may appear in an image that is sharp and highly resolved, or it may appear in an image that is blurry...

Does the human mind resemble the machines that can behave like it? Biologically inspired machine-learning systems approach “human-level” accuracy in an astounding variety of domains, and even predict human brain activity—raising the exciting possibility that such systems represent the world like we do. However, even seemingly intelligent machines f...

Arguably the most foundational principle in perception research is that our experience of the world goes beyond the retinal image; we perceive the distal environment itself, not the proximal stimulation it causes. Shape may be the paradigm case of such “unconscious inference”: When a coin is rotated in depth, we infer the circular object it truly i...

The world contains not only objects and features, but also relations between them. When a piece of fruit is in a bowl, and the bowl is on a table, we appreciate not only the individual objects and their features, but also the relations containment and support, which abstract away from the particular objects involved. How does the mind represent rel...

The rise of sophisticated machine-recognition systems has brought with it a rise in comparisons between human and machine perception. But such comparisons face an asymmetry: Whereas machine perception of some stimulus can often be probed through direct and explicit measures, much of human perceptual knowledge is latent, incomplete, or embedded in u...

Resource rationality may explain suboptimal patterns of reasoning; but what of “anti-Bayesian” effects where the mind updates in a direction opposite the one it should? We present two phenomena – belief polarization and the size-weight illusion – that are not obviously explained by performance- or resource-based constraints, nor by the authors’ bri...

Predictive Processing theories hold that the mind’s core aim is to minimize prediction-error about its experiences. But prediction-error minimization can be 'hacked', by placing oneself in highly predictable environments where nothing happens. Recent philosophical work suggests that this is a surprisingly serious challenge, highlighting the obstacl...

Perception research traditionally investigates how actual states of the world are seen-how we perceive the shapes, colors, and locations that objects actually have. By contrast, everyday life provokes us to consider possible states of the world that have not yet (and may not ever) actually obtain. When assembling furniture or completing a jigsaw pu...

Impossible figures represent the world in ways it cannot be. From the work of M.C. Escher to any popular perception textbook, such experiences show how some principles of mental processing can be so entrenched and inflexible as to produce absurd and even incoherent outcomes that the perceiver knows cannot occur in reality. Surprisingly, however, su...

Does the human mind resemble the machine-learning systems that mirror its performance? Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved human-level benchmarks in classifying novel images. These advances support technologies such as autonomous vehicles and machine diagnosis; but beyond this, they serve as candidate models for human vision itself....

Can what we know change what we see? A line of research stretching back nearly a century suggests that knowing an object’s canonical color can alter its visual appearance, such that objectively gray bananas appear to be tinged with yellow, and objectively orange hearts appear redder than they really are. Such “memory color” effects have constituted...