tal boger

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

Lab-mate got my ass on the lab when2meet

Amazing new work from @gabrielwaterhouse.bsky.social and @samiyousif.bsky.social! I'm convinced the crowd size illusion is real, but the rooms full of people watching Gabe give awesome talks at @socphilpsych.bsky.social and @vssmtg.bsky.social were no illusion!

@sallyberson.bsky.social in action at @socphilpsych.bsky.social! #SPP2025

Susan Carey sitting in the front row of a grad student talk (by @talboger.bsky.social) and going back and forth during Q&A is what makes the @socphilpsych.bsky.social so special! Loved this interaction 🤗

Now officially out! psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...

(Free version here: talboger.github.io/files/Boger_...)

A visual advertisement of VSS projects from the Firestone Lab

It's @vssmtg.bsky.social! So excited to share this year's projects from the lab, including brand new research directions and some deep dives on foundational issues.

More info @ perception.jhu.edu/vss/.

See you on the 🏖!

#VSS2025

Together, these results demonstrate multiple new phenomena of stylistic perception, and more generally introduce a scientific approach to the study of style. Stay tuned for more projects on this theme, including developmental work analyzing stylistic representation in kids!

Finally, we sought a computational account of stylistic similarity. We found that an object recognition model (with no explicit knowledge of style) successfully predicts human judgments of similarity across styles.

But these cases involve extracting style to discard it in a sense. Might we also use style to generate new representations? Suppose you’re shown the fork and spoon from a styled cutlery set; can you imagine the knife? We used a priming task to find exactly these representations.

Next, we considered cases of ‘discounting’ in vision, like when we discount lighting conditions to discern an object’s color, or when we discount a cloth to discern the object beneath it. We found similar effects for style: Vision discounts style to discriminate images.

First, we were inspired by ‘font tuning’, wherein the mind adapts to typefaces in ways that aid text comprehension. Might similar effects arise for style? In other words, might perception tune to the style of images in ways that aid scene comprehension? We show: Yes!

So, we thought, let’s study style perception like we study those processes! We adapted a number of paradigms used in those literatures to study how the mind represents style.

Here’s the idea: Seeing style involves ‘parsing’ content from form. The mind does this in other contexts too, like reading (separating typeface from letter identity) and maybe even color constancy (separating surface reflectance from lighting conditions).

Style is the subject of considerable humanistic study, from art history to sociology to political theory. But a scientific account of style perception has remained elusive.

Using style transfer algorithms, we generated stimuli in various styles to use in psychophysics studies.

Looking at Van Gogh’s Starry Night, we see not only its content (a French village beneath a night sky) but also its *style*. How does that work? How do we see style?

In @nathumbehav.nature.com, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I take an experimental approach to style perception! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Sam Clarke & Sami Yousif, Can we “see” value? Spatiotopic “visual” adaptation to an imperceptible dimension - PhilPapers Adaptation is a fundamental mechanism of biological cognitive systems. To many, adaptation is also a litmus test — a tool for discerning what is perceived as opposed to what is merely ...

Sam Clarke and I have been writing a lot about adaptation -- what it is, what it isn't, what it reveals about perception. We've just released a preprint that pushes the boundaries of adaptation even further. We document spatially selective adaptation to arbitrary *value*.

philpapers.org/rec/CLACWS

Danny wolf transferred from Yale to Michigan, what is he, writing a friggin metaethics dissertation, folks?

Children’s Understanding of Topological Relations Abstract. A core aim of developmental cognitive science is to uncover the basic building blocks of human thought. For instance, work revealing that even young children, adults without formal education...

I'm really, really excited about our recent paper on children's understanding of topological spatial relations (w/ Lily Goldstein and Liz Brannon). I've linked the paper here, but I'll summarize the thread below.

direct.mit.edu/opmi/article...

Check out the pre-print here (osf.io/preprints/ps...), and see all the experiments for yourself — including the illusory soccer balls — here (perceptionstudies.github.io/persistence).

One fun thing that came up in the review process is that different people have vastly different definitions of what ‘object persistence’ is. We find this really interesting, so we wrote a full section devoted to spelling out these differences in hopes of opening up some discussion.

We suggest that object persistence may be the simplest and best explanation for event completion. In our paper, we discuss how this might relate to other memory distortions (like representational momentum), and object/event cognition more broadly.

We found large filling-in effects almost everywhere (not just due to inattention or an object-presence bias) — including when we disrupted cues previously proposed to create event completion. But abolishing object persistence made event completion effects disappear entirely.

This allowed us to systematically disrupt various cues that have been proposed to create event completion effects. These included causality, continuity, familiarity, physical coherence, event coherence, and object persistence.

We rendered animations in Blender — like the one you just saw — with an object either present or absent in each half. Participants watched these animations and simply had to complete a forced-choice judgment about whether the ball was present or absent in a given half.

Event completion is a phenomenon where you falsely remember (i.e., ‘complete’) a part of an event that wasn’t really shown. People propose lots of interesting mechanisms for event completion (and other kinds of event-based distortions). But what really explains it?

Watch this video.

Do you remember seeing a ball in the second half of the video? Up to 37% of our participants reported seeing a ball, even though it wasn’t there. Why?

In a new paper in press @ Cognition, Brent Strickland and I ask what causes event completion. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thus, we think random behavior can — and should! — be viewed as trait-like. That is: Just like your personality traits are stable across contexts and time, so too is the way in which you may behave randomly.

results from experiment 3. behavior was stable across a one-year delay!

But for random behavior to be truly trait-like, it should also be stable over *time*. So, in Experiment 3, we tested the same participants from Experiment 2 one full year later (!). We found remarkably stable behavior across these two timepoints.

results from experiment 2. behavior was stable across a random-number-generation and a two-dimensional random-location-generation task.

This provided initial evidence for stable random behavior across tasks. However, numbers and one-dimensional locations share a representational format (i.e., a mental number line). In Experiment 2, we extended this to two-dimensional random locations and found the same pattern of results.