Chaz Firestone

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Our 52nd Annual Meeting will be held from June 18–20, 2026 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, with a pre-conference on Mental Control and Agency held at JHU on June 17
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We are currently inviting submissions of papers (talks and posters)!

Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs The selective revision of beliefs in light of new evidence has been considered one of the hallmarks of human-level rationality. However, tests of this ability in other species are lacking. We examined...

Are humans really the only rational animals? Our NEW PAPER 🎉 out in @science.org suggests otherwise! In a large collaboration led with my joint first author @hanna-schleihauf.bsky.social, we show that “Chimpanzees rationally revise their beliefs” 🧵

laura lewis and her title slide: “Curious Cousins: Social Memory, Curiosity and Emotions in Great Apes”

Amazing talk and visit by @laurasimonelewis.bsky.social!! Thank you for sharing your work with us here @jhu.edu

we were so innocent back then

we made it boys! (from the @chronicle.com)

OMG it's @chazfirestone.bsky.social !

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also east side pockets shared my instagram story so that made my decade www.instagram.com/stories/dire...

showing the kiddos what brown university looks like! it’s where mommy and daddy met 🥰

can't wait to disappoint my audience when I get to the "brain" half of the talk and all the slides are blank

Ad for Chaz's talk at Brown

Ad for Chaz's talk at MIT

Excited to head north this week for some talks! Come say hi if you're nearby :)

Wednesday (11/12) @ Brown: events.brown.edu/copsy/event/...

Thursday (11/13) @ MIT: bcs.mit.edu/events/collo...

panoramic photo of Tal lecturing

Congratulations (and thank you) to @talboger.bsky.social, who lectured in front of nearly 500 @jhu.edu undergraduates today on the psychology of music! They didn’t see it coming, and then they loved it :)

The perception of silence | PNAS Auditory perception is traditionally conceived as the perception of sounds—a friend’s voice, a clap of thunder, a minor chord. However, daily life ...

Thanks! We cite and discuss plenty of work like this in our own paper (www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...). The paper you linked to, of course, appeared after ours did.

So enjoyed hearing @ruizhegoh.bsky.social share his work on the perception of silence on the latest episode of @vox.com’s “unexplainable” podcast! 🤫 #poopoo

open.spotify.com/episode/6V2a...

Philosophy for vision scientists....or else

me: finding a recent and relevant Chaz phil vis paper that I had missed through zohran-posting

also me: i’m still using bluesky like it’s twitter aren’t i

you: nobody reads papers anymore, how are we supposed to do any deep thinking together as a scholarly community

me, an intellectual: have you seen this zohran mamdani sign generator

bsky.app/profile/chaz...

MACHINE FAILURES can be superficial or deep and it's hard to tell without considering performance constraints

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

bsky.app/profile/chaz...

this is how my views will finally catch on

tfw the ceremony is scheduled at peak bedtime

(thank you apa!! and everyone!!)

my team lost and it was still the best world series of all time

first he slaps chris rock, now this

I'd add that interpretations of blindsight as involving "a stimulus that does not enter consciousness" are quite controversial, for some of the same reasons. My collaborator @ianbphillips.bsky.social has written what is, in my view, the definitive treatment: www.ianbphillips.com/uploads/2/2/...

We also use detection-theoretic statistics to show that our subjects, as a group, are conservative in their reports of awareness, giving additional reason to think that those who say "no" to yes/no questions about whether they noticed a given stimulus are actually playing it safe with their answers.

It's a great question! In this case the 'subsequent choices' are explicit reports about the very stimulus in question. Subjects can tell us where the stimulus was located on the display, what color it was, and so on. We think the natural explanation of such accurate reports is that they could see it

What does postdiction show about the speed of consciousness? In this forth. piece in BBS, I respond to @smfleming.bsky.social + @matthiasmichel.bsky.social's claim that postdiction shows consciousness is slow -- too slow for its purpose to be online action guidance. 1/3 philpapers.org/rec/PHIPAT-14

paper: sensitivity to visual features in inattentional blindness

new evidence for phenomenal consciousness just dropped!
very interesting study by Makaela Natker, @chazfirestone.bsky.social, Howard Egeth, @ianbphillips.bsky.social

Seeing the bigger picture Experts at Johns Hopkins shed new light on inattentional blindness, the tendency among us to miss noticing something obvious when our minds are caught up in other things

We tend to assume that we will see things right in front of us. "But if there is some big object casting light into our eyes, and we wouldn't see it because our attention is elsewhere—that's really fascinating!" says @chazfirestone.bsky.social. hub.jhu.edu/magazine/202...