Chaz Firestone
@chazfirestone.bsky.social
5.9K followers 770 following 390 posts
Cognitive scientist studying how we see + think @ Johns Hopkins University. 🇨🇦 Lab: https://perception.jhu.edu/
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Reposted by Chaz Firestone
ryanlei.bsky.social
Every developmental psychologist Is like “but my lecture slides!”
chazfirestone.bsky.social
This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis.

Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇
Screenshot of a paper abstract:

“Core knowledge” refers to a set of cognitive systems that underwrite early representations of the physical and social world, appear universally across cultures, and likely result from our genetic endowment. Although this framework is canonically considered as a hypothesis about early emerging conception — how we think and reason about the world — here we present an alternative view: that many such representations are inherently perceptual in nature. This “core perception” view explains an intriguing (and otherwise mysterious) aspect of core-knowledge processes and representations: that they also operate in adults, where they display key empirical signatures of perceptual processing. We first illustrate this overlap using recent work on “core physics”, the domain of core knowledge concerned with physical objects, representing properties such as persistence through time, cohesion, solidity, and causal interactions. We review evidence that adult vision incorporates exactly these representations of core physics, while also displaying empirical signatures of genuinely perceptual mechanisms, such as rapid and automatic operation on the basis of specific sensory inputs, informational encapsulation, and interaction with other perceptual processes. We further argue that the same pattern holds for other areas of core knowledge, including geometrical, numerical, and social domains. In light of this evidence, we conclude that many infant results appealing to precocious reasoning abilities are better explained by sophisticated perceptual mechanisms shared by infants and adults. Our core-perception view elevates the status of perception in accounting for the origins of conceptual knowledge, and generates a range of ready-to-test hypotheses in developmental psychology, vision science, and more.
chazfirestone.bsky.social
Congratulations to @talboger.bsky.social, who finally has his pro wrestling name: The "psychophysical scalpel".
screenshot of a news article in which tal's methodological technique is referred to as a "psychophysical scalpel"
chazfirestone.bsky.social
This is a big one! A 4-year writing project over many timezones, arguing for a reimagining of the influential "core knowledge" thesis.

Led by @daweibai.bsky.social, we argue that much of our innate knowledge of the world is not "conceptual" in nature, but rather wired into perceptual processing. 👇
Screenshot of a paper abstract:

“Core knowledge” refers to a set of cognitive systems that underwrite early representations of the physical and social world, appear universally across cultures, and likely result from our genetic endowment. Although this framework is canonically considered as a hypothesis about early emerging conception — how we think and reason about the world — here we present an alternative view: that many such representations are inherently perceptual in nature. This “core perception” view explains an intriguing (and otherwise mysterious) aspect of core-knowledge processes and representations: that they also operate in adults, where they display key empirical signatures of perceptual processing. We first illustrate this overlap using recent work on “core physics”, the domain of core knowledge concerned with physical objects, representing properties such as persistence through time, cohesion, solidity, and causal interactions. We review evidence that adult vision incorporates exactly these representations of core physics, while also displaying empirical signatures of genuinely perceptual mechanisms, such as rapid and automatic operation on the basis of specific sensory inputs, informational encapsulation, and interaction with other perceptual processes. We further argue that the same pattern holds for other areas of core knowledge, including geometrical, numerical, and social domains. In light of this evidence, we conclude that many infant results appealing to precocious reasoning abilities are better explained by sophisticated perceptual mechanisms shared by infants and adults. Our core-perception view elevates the status of perception in accounting for the origins of conceptual knowledge, and generates a range of ready-to-test hypotheses in developmental psychology, vision science, and more.
Reposted by Chaz Firestone
daweibai.bsky.social
Happy to share that our BBS target article has been accepted: “Core Perception”: Re-imagining Precocious Reasoning as Sophisticated Perceiving
With Alon Hafri, @veroniqueizard.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & Brent Strickland
Read it here: doi.org/10.1017/S014...
A short thread [1/5]👇
chazfirestone.bsky.social
What a lovely 'spotlight' of @talboger.bsky.social's work on style perception! Written by @aennebrielmann.bsky.social in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social.

See Aenne's paper below, as well as Tal's original work here: www.nature.com/articles/s41...
chazfirestone.bsky.social
“my kids have such different personalities!”

the personalities:
Reposted by Chaz Firestone
jhu.edu
When a butterfly becomes a bear, perception takes center stage.

Research from @talboger.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social and the Perception & Mind Lab.
Reposted by Chaz Firestone
jorge-morales.bsky.social
Imagine an apple 🍎. Is your mental image more like a picture or more like a thought? In a new preprint led by Morgan McCarty—our lab's wonderful RA—we develop a new approach to this old cognitive science question and find that LLMs excel at tasks thought to be solvable only via visual imagery. 🧵
Artificial Phantasia: Evidence for Propositional Reasoning-Based Mental Imagery in Large Language Models
This study offers a novel approach for benchmarking complex cognitive behavior in artificial systems. Almost universally, Large Language Models (LLMs) perform best on tasks which may be included in th...
arxiv.org
chazfirestone.bsky.social
yes please don’t torture your students too much! they can only take so many em dashes and italics (i get carried away with those)
Reposted by Chaz Firestone
ruizhegoh.bsky.social
Great to have another paper with @chazfirestone.bsky.social @ianbphillips.bsky.social and the brilliant Hanbei Zhou out! In this paper we demonstrate that stimuli within events are perceived further apart in time — an event-based analog of “object-based warping”. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
chazfirestone.bsky.social
Our new paper explores an analogy between representations of objects and representations of events, finding that similar illusions arise for both! Check it out 👇
Screenshot from a figure of the paper, depicting object segmentation, event segmentation, and illusions created by each
Reposted by Chaz Firestone
ianbphillips.bsky.social
You will definitely not regret reading this fantastic new paper by my (and @chazfirestone.bsky.social, Hanna Pickard and Monique Wonderly's) brilliant student, Rui Zhe Goh. I learned a huge amount working with him on it.
ruizhegoh.bsky.social
Really happy to have a new paper forthcoming at PPR!

Ever wondered if there’s any point in feeling regret? In this paper, I argue that regret is valuable because it helps us overcome temptation. Check it out: philpapers.org/rec/GOHRLA
Reposted by Chaz Firestone
ruizhegoh.bsky.social
Really happy to have a new paper forthcoming at PPR!

Ever wondered if there’s any point in feeling regret? In this paper, I argue that regret is valuable because it helps us overcome temptation. Check it out: philpapers.org/rec/GOHRLA
chazfirestone.bsky.social
had a little chat with the greatest grappling coach of all time! he was also a philosophy grad student at columbia way back when. mind blown

www.newyorker.com/culture/pers...

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Da...
a selfie with chaz and john danaher screenshot of new yorker profile of danaher excerpt from interview with danaher:

The people I was most interested in were philosophers of science.
You have great minds, like Popper, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Kuhn, and my own dissertation supervisor, Isaac Levi.
These were people who were fascinated by the question of research programs.
What makes some progressive, what makes some regressive? What makes them healthy, what makes them unhealthy?
For me, all of my coaching is structured along those lines.