iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 20h

claude, when asked if there are any reddit reviews of a product I’m interested in. thanks for not fabricating URLs! (…were you considering it though? 🤔)

Screenshot of a Claude chat on a phone. Claude: "I can't get you direct links — my search tool isn't returning Reddit threads at all, even when I restrict it to reddit.com. So rather than fabricate URLs, here's where to look"

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

for the 2nd time in 3 years, we @jhu.edu are spending the semester in a reading group on foundational issues in cognitive science, centered on the origin & format of concepts. 8 faculty from 4 depts, + many of their students & postdocs. can’t say enough about this wonderful intellectual community! 🤩

a pano and a selfie of happy cognitive scientists sitting around a seminar table in a discussion

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

AI is so amazing look at this perfectly coherent solar system rug at my 5yo’s play place

an AI slop rug with gibberish planet names, a flagpole going through an astronaut’s hand, and other nonsense

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Out today! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

here at @jhu.edu we believe so strongly in collaboration that @talboger.bsky.social gave his latest internal department talk about work he did outside of my lab, our department, and our university! (lucky you @samiyousif.bsky.social @dorsaamir.bsky.social)

tal’s title slide: “randomness revisited”

a slide with names and faces of tal’s collaborators (sami yousif and dorsa amir), with the text “(sorry chaz)” beneath it

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 26/08/2026

just discovered a really fun way to participate in the trade war

a list of canadian goods covered by recent US tariffs: honey, whey, and whiskey

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

out today! www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

met up with this guy (we’re neighbors) for champagne! congrats @noamchompers.bsky.social

Chaz and Noam holding champagne glasses toasting Noam’s many successes

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

people making some wild claims on the bird website

a tweet from vlad chituc: “cognition doesn’t affect perception, I’m sorry to break it to y’all”

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 05/07/2026

Noam and Noam-in-training watching the tall Lord of the Rings guy score goals

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

who are you prof dr dr and how long did it take you to get that way

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 03/07/2026

just when you think you’ve made it, you book a train ticket that allows for academic titles and realize you can always have more doctorates

a drop down menu of titles:

Dr
Prof
Dr Dr
Prof Dr
Prof Dr Dr

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

RD is cheap & easy to collect (unlike fancier action measures that also predict confidence), it may be useful in special populations (infants, nonhuman animals), and you may even have collected RD without realizing it; it's been under our noses! Yet it carries meaningful information about cognition.

Hand of a non-human primate touching a screen

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

In our new work, we show that response duration tracks confidence in several perceptual and cognitive tasks. Whether finding a face in noise, judging average motion direction, or answering a trivia question, the length of time you hold down a key predicts how confident you are in your response.

Figure 2 of the paper, showing paradigm and results from three experiments

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Response time has been explored for over a century. But response duration has been almost entirely neglected, despite being just as ubiquitous and easy to collect. Several researchers have even pointed this out, drawing attention to this measure and its promise. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

Screenshot of title and abstract of a previous paper on response duration by Pfister et al.

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

Wait…don't we already know that response time (RT) predicts confidence? Yes! Our investigation concerns response *duration* (RD). Consider keyboard-based tasks: RT (or, better, response initiation time; RIT) is the time between stimulus and keyDown. RD is the time between keyDown and keyUp!

Schematic diagram distinguishing response initiation time from response duration

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

You press ‘send’ on a high-stakes email but hesitate when lifting your finger. You make a chess move but linger on the piece before letting go. Familiar? In @pnas.org, Hanbei Zhou @ruizhegoh.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social & I show that response *duration* tracks confidence! shorturl.at/A9NVe

Two images, one of a finger pressed a key, another of a hand on a chess piece

Screenshot of first page of paper, "Response duration tracks confidence"

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

if the tournament stops now do we win

a world cup bracket showing that canada (and only canada so far) has advanced to the round of 16

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 23/06/2026

nobody will remember: - papers you published - grant dollars you raised - citations you received people will remember - conference parties you hosted @socphilpsych.bsky.social #SPP2026

linkedin post from Kyle Law:

On my way to my flight back to Arizona, I want to briefly contibute to the popular imagination by documenting that I had a wonderful time at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology 2026 annual meeting at The Johns Hopkins University.
Josh Rottman and Laura Soter curated a really stellar conference lineup and I had so many productive (and fun) conversations about morality, ethics, ontology, and metaphysics with new and old friends alike! Here's a photo to prove I was there — shoutout to Christina Jinhee Capozzoli for giving a sensational talk about our work on morality and social norms.
Also want to thank Chaz Firestone for hosting (and DJing) an absolute festival of a party and Paige Amormino for being such a good friend/collaborator!

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Closing us out is Frédérique de Vignemont, on “Seeing the Future”! #phiVis #vss2026

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

Next ups Will Davies on the perception of ‘stuff’! #phiVis #vss2026

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

in ONE HOUR we close out #VSS2026 with the 6th iteration of #phiVis! Ft. talks and commentaries by @matthiasmichel.bsky.social Wilma Bainbridge, Will Davies, @vivianpaulun.bsky.social, Frédérique de Vignemont, and Bill Warren! 1pm-3pm in the Banyan/Citrus Room

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

How opaque is our own visual processing to us? Our final lab presentation at #VSS2026 is by Noa Perlmutter, whose talk (w/ @ianbphillips.bsky.social) reports a surprising degree of awareness of our own visual biases. 11:30am in Talk Room 2!

title slide of Noa's talk, "Introspecting visual biases"

Slide screenshot from Noa's talk. 50 dots are shown, but subjects estimate 38 (a well-documented 'underestimation bias' in visual cognition). Do people know they're exhibiting this bias?

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

how fat free is the gelato? wrong answers only #vss2026

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Tal in action! And even a few coasters left…get yours now while supplies last (you can DM @talboger.bsky.social) #VSS2026

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Here's an airplane. And here's a duck. But wait — they're the very same image, just rotated! Right now in the Banyan Breezeway, @talboger.bsky.social shows how these and other 'visual anagrams' can be used to study the perception of animacy. (This is also your chance to grab your lab merch) #VSS2026

Two coasters etched with images of an a airplane and a duck, respectively. But in fact they are a single coaster at two orientations.

Perceiving animacy in otherwise-identical images

Even when completely motionless, some objects look animate (e.g. dogs, elephants) while others don’t (e.g. boots, sofas). A rich literature suggests that the mind automatically encodes this property, reporting striking effects of perceived animacy on visual attention and working memory. However, objects that differ in animacy tend to differ in lower-level features (e.g. shape), and such confounds often account for these seemingly high-level effects. Thus, whether animacy itself drives visual processing remains unanswered and even controversial. Here, we take a new approach to this question by exploiting “visual anagrams”: static images whose interpretations change radically with orientation. We used a diffusion model to generate such images in ways that varied animacy — e.g., a dog in one orientation and a boot when rotated, or an elephant in one orientation and a sofa when rotated. Each anagram image contains the exact same pixels in either orientation, such that animacy varies across the two interpretations while nearly all lower-level features remain constant. 9 experiments used this approach to demonstrate that animacy itself guides memory and attention. Experiments 1–2 found that changes to an object in a memory array were more detectable when they altered animacy (e.g., dog→sofa is more detectable than dog→elephant, even when the elephant and sofa are the very same image, just rotated). Experiments 3–6 found that animate targets in a search array were easier to find among inanimate distractors than among other animate distractors (and vice versa). Finally, Experiments 6–9 verified that differences in orientation (one of the only lower-level features uncontrolled by visual anagrams) cannot account for these results; the effects disappeared when using silhouetted, blurred, and pixelated versions of the anagrams. Thus, visual processing extracts animacy itself, over and above its covarying lower-level features.

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Tal in action! #VSS2026 (Bonus content: #phiVis speaker Frédérique de Vignemont!)

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Is the person in this video stepping over a real box? Or are they only pretending one is there and performing a convincing pantomime? At 6pm today in Talk Room 2, Sholei Croom presents their latest work on naive intuitions about perception and action! #VSS2026

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

Once upon a time, representational momentum seemed to be about motion. Then Alon Hafri + @jorge-morales.bsky.social + others extended it to other continuous visual properties. Can we go even further? At 2:45pm in the Banyan Breezeway, @talboger.bsky.social reports repmo for written phrases! #VSS2026

Trial structure for Tal's "phrasal momentum" task

Phrasal momentum
The world looks different from one moment to the next, and various mental processes anticipate such changes. A foundational example of this anticipation is representational momentum (RM), wherein the mind ‘plays forward’ visual events. For example, falling objects are recalled as closer to the ground, and rotating rectangles are recalled as more rotated. Though early studies hypothesized that RM primarily concerns the anticipation of motion, recent work demonstrates that it arises for other continuous properties, such as the brightness of a stimulus or even how melted an ice cube appears. Here, we extend representational momentum even further than these sophisticated phenomena, to discrete (rather than continuous) properties, as well as to more conceptual (rather than purely visual) properties of the world. Participants watched animations of common phrases being typed; the animations were interrupted partway through (e.g., “The quick brown fox jum”), and participants used a slider to recall the phrase’s state at the moment it disappeared. 5 experiments revealed ‘phrasal momentum’: The mind plays forward the phrases we see, in ways that distort visual memory. This distortion was greater for real phrases than for (a) strings of “X”s (Experiment 1), (b) length-equated strings of random letters (Experiment 2), and (c) scrambled versions of the words composing the phrases (e.g., “heT kicqu rbnow oxf”; Experiment 3). We also observed a stronger distortion for normal, in-order phrases than for word-shuffled versions of those same phrases (e.g. “The quick brown fox…” vs. “Fox quick the brown…”; Experiment 4). Finally, Experiment 5 found that phrasal momentum follows a conceptual ‘gradient’; in a single experiment combining all the aforementioned conditions, normal phrases produced the strongest RM effects, followed by shuffled phrases, scrambled letters, random letters, and Xs. Thus, representational momentum arises even for discrete and non-visual stimuli.

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

(Lana graduates from JHU this spring with approximately one gazillion honors, so she let me borrow some in the very fancy/professional graduation photos she took)

A second photo of Lana and Chaz, this time with Chaz posing with Lana's many honor cords

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 17/05/2026

How well-calibrated are we to the difficulty of the (mental) actions we are about to take? *Right now* in the Banyan Breezeway, undergraduate Lana Milman explores the perception of "mental affordances", using countability as a case study! #VSS2026

task sequence for Lana's poster: subjects see two 'cookies' with 'M&Ms' on them, decide which one looks easier to count, then have to count the M&Ms on that cookie. do counting preferences match counting performance?

Can you count this? Perceiving affordances for mental actions

We can often see how easy a physical action is to execute, such as climbing stairs or grasping an object. Is the same true for mental actions? Can we also see how easy it is to execute a cognitive operation, before actually carrying it out? Whereas the perception of physical affordances has a long history in cognitive science, the hypothesis that we perceive “mental affordances” (McClelland, 2020) has received less empirical attention. Here, four experiments explore this hypothesis for the mental affordance “countability”—how easily an array of objects can be precisely counted. In Experiments 1-2, subjects briefly (500ms or 2500ms) saw two “cookies” (circles) containing a number of “M&Ms” (dots), varying in size (large/small/mixed), color (single/mixed), opacity (full/partial), and grouping (clustered/dispersed). Subjects selected whichever cookie seemed easier to count (causing it to reappear onscreen), and then counted that cookie’s M&Ms. In Experiments 3-4, subjects counted a single cookie’s M&Ms, without indicating preference. Results showed that even a 500ms preview was sufficient to form strong preferences for countability, with subjects preferring fully opaque to partially opaque M&Ms, clustered M&Ms to dispersed M&Ms, and large M&Ms over mixed and small M&Ms. However, these impressions were only partially accurate. Subjects performed better with opaque M&Ms, and large as opposed to mixed and small M&Ms, in line with their preferences. But performance was better for dispersed M&Ms than clustered M&Ms—contrary to their preference. Moreover, despite expressing no preference for single over mixed-color M&Ms, subjects performed better with single colors. These results suggest that naïve observers can rapidly form impressions of a mental affordance and use it to guide behavior—but that, just like with physical affordances, we may be imperfectly calibrated to our actual capabilities.

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

not saying we have the best lab but…we have the best lab 🤩❤️ #vss2026

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 16/05/2026

Free wine (and free philosophy) at the #phiVis opening reception table! Stop by :) #vss2026

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

What categories come to mind for these people? All kinds of answers would do. But at #vss2026, @ruizhegoh.bsky.social (w/ Jiayi Li & @ianbphillips.bsky.social) report an androcentric bias in image classification—Jolie is called a "woman" more than DiCaprio is called a "man". 345pm, Banyan Breezeway!

images of Angelina Jolie and Leonardo DiCaprio. above them is the question "What is this a picture of?", and below are candidate answers, including "Person", "Actor", "American", but also "Woman" and "Man".

Gender bias in visual categorization: When DiCaprio is an actor but Jolie is a woman

Objects can be categorized at differing levels of abstraction; for example, the same image may be classified as a blue jay, a bird, an animal, or a living thing. This pattern also arises for people; for example, the same image may be classified as Gordon Ramsay, a chef, a Scot, or a person. But which categories are most visually salient—and is such salience biased by gender? We investigated this question using a visual categorization task. Subjects saw images of objects and people, and were asked simply to name any category corresponding to the image. In addition to objects such as vegetables and buildings, each subject saw one woman and one man, drawn from one of the following classes: 1) famous people from various professions (e.g., Angelina Jolie and Leonardo DiCaprio, Serena Williams and LeBron James); 2) stock photographs of anonymous people from minimally-gendered categories (e.g., tourist, pedestrian); 3) AI-generated images of these same minimally-gendered categories, created to be identical except for gender. Every image was part of a matched pair of men and women from the same image class, but no subject saw a man and woman from the same matched pair. (For example, a subject could see Angelina Jolie and LeBron James, but never Angelina Jolie and Leonardo DiCaprio.) Remarkably, subjects were more likely to categorize women according to their gender than men. Put differently, they were biased to say “actor” for DiCaprio but “woman” for Jolie, and “pedestrian” for male pedestrians but “woman” for female pedestrians. This trend arose for all three image classes, suggesting that it was not driven by idiosyncratic image differences or knowledge of the people depicted. Our results reveal a gender bias in visual categorization that may have pervasive cognitive and social implications.

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

It's #VSS2026! SO excited about the projects we've brought with us this year, and of course #phiVis to close things out. Come say hi, and don't forget to grab your lab 'merch' 👀 perception.jhu.edu/vss/

A lab 'ad' laying out VSS 2026 presentations from the Perception & Mind Lab. More information can be found at https://perception.jhu.edu/vss/

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

did not expect to get this emotional at the toy store today

photograph of a miniature die cast spirit airlines plane

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Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 11/05/2026

fresh batch of lab merch, just in time for VSS!

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