iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Chaz Firestone

This is incredible. Yes, ok, I do use silly, easy passwords sometimes. But I have the decency of not bragging about cybersecurity while blasting my four-letter password.

191

Reposted by Chaz Firestone

tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

We often say that humans struggle to produce random sequences… but what if that's not the whole story? In a new paper, @dorsaamir.bsky.social, @samiyousif.bsky.social & I show that context matters (a lot!). When playing strategic games, humans can produce near-random behavior osf.io/preprints/ps...

17728

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

4643

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

humanity’s only hope is to colonize varub

140

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

1281

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

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

06713

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

1202

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

050

Reposted by Chaz Firestone

William Ngiam | 严祥全 @williamngiam.github.io · 22/08/2026

Papers so good that it can't be touched

041

Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

when twitter was fun and innocent. now he’s “MC HAMMER e/acc”

060

Reposted by Chaz Firestone

Zoe Drayson @zoedrayson.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Happy six-year anniversary of that time MC Hammer shared @chazfirestone.bsky.social's paper

Twitter screenshot of MC Hammer sharing a link to 'Sustained representation of perspectival shape' and Chaz Firestone thanking him

1372

Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Learned a lot from the recent BBS target article by @mdubova.bsky.social and @sabinasloman.bsky.social, and also from this new commentary by @talboger.bsky.social! Take a look at Tal's explainer thread below 👇

071

Reposted by Chaz Firestone

tal boger @talboger.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

BBS recently published a great piece by @mdubova.bsky.social & @sabinasloman.bsky.social on “Excess capacity learning”. I argue D&S’s framework overlooks a special kind of representation that encodes information both minimally and perfectly: lossless compression. philpapers.org/archive/BOGC...

Figure for my BBS commentary ("Compression without compromise") on Dubova & Sloman's target article ("Excess capacity learning")

13011

Chaz Firestone @chazfirestone.bsky.social · 27/07/2026

WOW, just one week from new paper to new feature! Thanks @jspsych.org team 🙏🤩

1341

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

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

015940

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

1411

Reposted by Chaz Firestone

noam @noamchompers.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

well, i suppose i can now share a spot of good news. i've accepted a permanent position at australian catholic university. i'll be moving to sydney in january. i'm just delighted

633127

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”

1250

Reposted by Chaz Firestone

Dorsa Amir @dorsaamir.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

When we consider children in cultural evolution, we tend to cast them as recipients of adult culture. In our BBS target article, @sheinalew.bsky.social & I argued there's more: through 'peer cultures', children actively drive cultural adaptation. Our final paper + a rich set of responses is out now!

cambridge.org

Children as agents of cultural adaptation | Behavioral and Brain Sciences | Cambridge Core

Children as agents of cultural adaptation - Volume 49

412142

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

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

0201

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

literally my brother ross and it indeed took some time

010

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

250

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

4170

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

Beyond the paper itself, you can check out our project page here, which includes demos of each of our experiments as well as other data and materials. perceptionresearch.org/responsedura...

perceptionresearch.org

Response Duration

162

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

141

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

Moreover, RD is independent of RIT, in two senses: RD explains variance in confidence unexplained by RIT, and (replicating previous work) it is uncorrelated with RIT. How long you hold down a key is independent of how long it took you to get there, and the two measures carry different information.

130

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

150

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.

140

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

140

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"

28721

Reposted by Chaz Firestone

emerson @saldemar.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

repost now while you still can

051

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

here’s a list of countries that have played one or more knockout games but have never conceded a goal in any of them: canada

0150

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

only nation in world cup history that has won 100% of its knockout games

27915

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

1393