iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 06/10/2026

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.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 17/09/2026

Alleged new Siri AI functionality. I'm terrified of running this command though. I...don't wanna know? (Sorry if I owe you something.)

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 01/09/2026

So close to the Arctic Circle!

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 16/08/2026

I guess it’s indeed hard to make friends in your middle age

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 14/08/2026

I just found our new lab logo

drawing by Odilon Redon of a terrifying looking surrealist eye like a hot air ballon carrying what looks like a human head. Odilon Redon. The Eye like a Strange Balloon Mounts toward Infinity (L'Œil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l'infini). 1882

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 01/08/2026

I’m still trying to understand why this car dealership subscribes to Science.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 23/07/2026

Our IRB is asking if we plan to use AI in our work. Considering trolling them and citing the tidyverse.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 13/07/2026

The Australasian Journal of Philosophy is not joking around. Go big or go home. #philsky

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 03/07/2026

yeah i'm pretty sure that's how words work

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 30/06/2026

Rewarded myself with a fancy tart

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 30/06/2026

Last day at Northeastern. My office is all packed up and empty.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 25/06/2026

These are really steep price increases from Apple (some over 30%). Yet another disruption from the machine learning explosion.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 18/06/2026

SPP off to a great start with Jennifer Nagel’s keynote “Conversations with machines”

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 12/06/2026

Yesterday, our lab had our traditional bi-annual (and Boston-farewell) outing in an evening of sip & paint, Asian fusion dinner, bowling (I crush them) and laughs and good conversations. I’m gonna miss them. Thankfully we’ll keep doing science together for a bit longer, albeit remotely.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 11/06/2026

When Mexico is playing in the World Cup

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 09/06/2026

As everything these days, the 4x+ increase in recommended payments must be driven by the AI craze. Cool cool cool.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 08/06/2026

Ok so they are definitely doing some kind dynamic pricing. This is from a different workspace our lab uses. Not sure if it’s the workspace or the filters. But either way, @joinprolific.bsky.social will basically eliminate psychological research from their platform with this nonsense.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 08/06/2026

WTF?! This is clearly unsustainable for academia. Also, are they using some kind of dynamic pricing?

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 21/05/2026

Metacognitive Honesty — a new field of research just dropped, courtesy of Claude's bizarre (but admittedly helpful) confession that it doesn't know how to proceed.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 18/05/2026

Very cool to finally have seen the Dalí museum in St. Petersburg. Especially cool to be here for #vss2026 and see the Dalmatian and Rubin’s vase illusions in his work.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 17/05/2026

Do you find these pictures annoying? Some people experience visual discomfort and report other subjectively displeasing effects with mid-range spatial frequencies. But does aversion translate into gaze avoidance? Stop by Michaela Klimova’s poster this morning in the Pavillion to learn more!

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 14/05/2026

Vision Science's Christmas is almost here! Our lab will present work —including collaborations with the one and only @meganakpeters.bsky.social — on mental imagery & vividness, LLMs, advanced decoding of reality monitoring signals in fMRI, pupillometry of fake light & visual discomfort! #vss2026

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 13/05/2026

A few days ago I went birding with a friend to Plum Island, MA. Really great spot. I was lucky to snatch this in-flight pic of a red-winged blackbird. #birds #photography #BirdOfTheDay #ECK 📷

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 05/05/2026

I went to Italy and the only thing I got was a large-format Divina Commedia illustrated by Gabriele dell'Otto—an acclaimed Marvel illustrator. Dante kicking condemned souls from Charon's boat like a bad-ass superhero cannot be topped.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 16/04/2026

Took my Sensation and Perception students to the Museum of Fine Arts. (Those are a bunch of Magritte’s in the background.)

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 01/04/2026

Google Gemini hallucinating when asking about Charles Bonnet Syndrome is *chef kiss* #vision

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 18/03/2026

All I'm asking is for a little bit of UI design awareness. I don't know, maybe don't put the OK button in red and to the left?

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 14/03/2026

I was literally coding a color experiment this morning.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 10/03/2026

new research program just dropped

A comic titled "Exploring Consciousness" by Grant Snider, featuring a 4×3 grid of panels, each illustrating a type of "consciousness" as a nautical visual pun. "Simple Consciousness" shows a small sailboat; "Self-Consciousness" shows someone nervously looking at their reflection in the water; "Sub-Consciousness" shows a submarine underwater; "Un-Consciousness" shows a person shipwrecked on rocks by a lighthouse; "Pre-Consciousness" shows a figure building a raft from logs on a prehistoric-looking shore; "Over-Consciousness" shows an enormous cargo ship looming over a tiny rowboat; "Super-Consciousness" shows a seaplane swooping over the water; "Animal Consciousness" shows a girl riding a whale; "Artificial Consciousness" shows a robot in a boat made of angular geometric shapes; "Cosmic Consciousness" shows an astronaut floating past planets in a clam-shaped vessel; and "Expanded Consciousness" is a wide final panel showing a massive multi-masted ship sailing a vibrant orange sea filled with sea creatures.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 26/02/2026

How much has it snowed in Boston, you ask? Well, enough that our neighbors made a whale out of snow.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 25/02/2026

This is so kind of you. Thanks for reading!

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 18/02/2026

Considering printing this in large format and hanging it in front of my desk to remind me to say no to things.

Painting with a person lying down with giant red letters spelling "no"

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 06/02/2026

I have news! After 4 fabulous years at Northeastern, this July I will be moving to Duke—with tenure! It’s hard to convey how grateful I am to everyone who has made this possible: from old professors in Mexico and mentors in the US to students, colleagues, and, of course, my amazing wife and family.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 29/01/2026

Academics can be nasty to each other, but we’ve come a long way. Consider this: senior professors don’t even try anymore to gouge out each other’s eyes to prove their superiority. There’s hardly any chance left to brag about the heroic self-control involved in not squeezing your rival’s balls.

A screenshot from a book that says: "At this distance, much of this squabbling seems childish. But these were adults intent on drawing blood, and on occasion the blows were not only rhetorical. In 1452, Poggio had been having a running quarrel with another papal secretary, the notoriously morose humanist George of Trebizond, over the burning question of who deserved more credit for several translations of ancient texts. When Poggio screamed at his rival that he was a liar, George struck Poggio with his fist. The two sulked back momentarily to their desks, but then the fight resumed, the seventy-two-year-old Poggio grabbling the fifty-seven-year-old George's cheek and mouth with one hand while attempting to gouge out his eye with the other. After it was over, in an angry"

$continuation from the previous quote: note to Poggio about the fracas, George represented himself as having acted with exemplary restraint: "Rightly I could have bitten off the fingers you stuck in my mouth; I did not. Since I was seated and you were standing, I thought of squeezing your testicles with both hands and thus lay you out; I did not do it." The whole thing seems a grotesque farce, akin to one of the stories in Poggio's jokebook, except for its real-world consequences: with his better contacts and more genial manner, Poggio had George expelled from the curia. Poggio ended his life covered with honors; George died obscure, resentful, and poor."$

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 26/01/2026

Turns out a foot and a half of snow is a lot of snow.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 20/01/2026

I find the idea of being in need of an urgent delivery of a philosophy book very amusing

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 14/01/2026

I was tricked by this naturally occurring visual illusion. Odd large puddle?

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 12/12/2025

When you have many collaborations and a flexible working schedule within your lab, being in Discord's top 5% users is what happens.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 11/12/2025

My reward after the VSS submission rush

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 09/12/2025

Even though there is latent organization to hue representation, we think that our minds do not naturally compute change trajectories within this latent space which prevents predictions about it. Sure enough, we do not find any evidence that people experience representational momentum for hue.

Bar plot for a representational momentum experiment about hue showing a lack of representational momentum

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 09/12/2025

So, it appears as though the mind forecasts the trajectory of changes in brightness, saturation, and proportion, and these predictions can distort our memories. Where 𝙙𝙤𝙚𝙨𝙣'𝙩 this happen? We hypothesized that the mind does not automatically represent the trajectory of changes in hue.

Color wheel with an arrow around a quarter of it indicting clock-wise motion and a question mark in the center.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 09/12/2025

Additionally, we show that motionless representational momentum happens outside of color perception and beyond basic visual properties. People remember things that were increasing in prevalence as being even more prevalent than they were.

Experimental design figure representing a square with mostly teal pixels progressively acquiring more pink pixels (with a random distribution) and then covered by a mask with a diagonal gradient going from pink to teal. A second frame shows the recall task in which subjects had to select the final square they saw by moving a slider.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 09/12/2025

When we show people brightening stimuli, they remember the last frame they saw as brighter than it really was. Similarly, people remember darkening stimuli as darker, saturating stimuli as more saturated, and desaturating stimuli as less saturated.

Experimental design figure representing a square progressively becoming brighter and then covered by a mask of random noise. A second frame shows the recall task in which subjects had to select the final square they saw by moving a slider.

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 09/12/2025

In seven preregistered experiments involving over 1,000 subjects, we show that this representational momentum transcends motion: Our minds make predictions that distort our memories about changes that involve no motion whatsoever, including changes in brightness, color saturation, and proportion.

Bar plots with results for 6 experiments showing representational momentum for brightness (experiments 1 to 4), saturation (experiment 5) and proportion (experiment 6).

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 09/12/2025

So, for example, if you glance at a photo of a person falling into the ocean, you will tend to remember the person being closer to the water than they really were. Cognitive scientists have documented countless examples of this phenomenon over the last ~40 years.

Two pictures, side by side, of a person jumping into the ocean about half way through their fall from a high cliff. On the left, the person's position is labeled as "perception"; on the right, the person is slightly closer to the water with their position labeled as "memory".

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 09/12/2025

Our minds are constantly trying to predict what's coming next. An unusual consequence of this is "representational momentum": When we observe moving things, our automatic predictions about them can distort our memories making us recall objects as if they were further along their trajectory.

Pictures of a toppling Jenga tower and a person's hand about to reach a glass

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 01/12/2025

The 90's seemed fun. Today IT departments are too square for this. #PhilosophySky

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Jorge Morales @jorgemorales.me · 28/11/2025

I don't mind big shoes (picture attached): Appropriately manly and mildly offensively appropriating of working class needs as middle class fashion. I just don't know what to make of those blue monstrosities!

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