tal boger

@talboger.bsky.social

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third-year phd student at jhu psych | perception + cognition https://talboger.github.io/

Figure 1 from Dubova & Sloman's target article, providing a schematic depiction of different capacity regimes.
Figure for my BBS commentary ("Compression without compromise") on Dubova & Sloman's target article ("Excess capacity learning")
Coasters of our anagram stimuli, including for real-world size (right).
The search effects disappeared with silhouetted version of the anagrams, suggesting that such effects do not merely arise due to differences in orientation (perhaps the only lower-level feature that varies with animacy in our stimuli).
Another set of visual search tasks, this time present/absent (instead of location search). We find that animacy guides search here, too, replicating our prior results.
Results from our location search task. Participants were faster to locate a target when it differed in animacy from its distractors.
Results from our visual working memory task. Participants were better at detecting changes when those changes altered animacy than when they did not.
These stimuli differ in animacy while holding nearly all lower-level features constant. This is because the animate objects and the inanimate ones are the same exact images, just rotated!
A schematic depiction of the "visual anagrams" model (Geng et al., 2024).
The mind seems to encode differences in animacy; but objects that differ in animacy also differ in shape, curvature, texture, and more.
Results from our aesthetic preference task. Participants who like complex shapes also like complex dot-arrays, melodies, and so on.
Results from our modified Stroop task. Shape complexity automatically interfered with judgments of word complexity.
A participant completing the tactile-visual transfer. Having learned that more jagged-feeling shapes are rewarded, participants inferred that more diversely colored dot-arrays were also rewarded.
Results from our reward transfer tasks. After learning to associate rewards with complex (or simple) stimuli of one domain, participants spontaneously inferred that this reward rule applied to a totally different domain.
Complex and simple stimuli across a variety of domains. Even though these stimuli are complex for different reasons, we suggest the mind unifies them by their complexity. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/p9xe3_v1
a large stack of anagram coasters in my suitcase, to be handed out at a poster!
Algorithmic complexity for dice randomness and 3x3 grid randomness (z-scored)
methods from lapidow & bonawitz, 2023. children are "dropped"
whereas previous work shows efficient visual search for real-world size, we did not find a similar effect with anagrams. our study included a successful replication of these previous findings with ordinary objects (i.e., non-anagram images).
people prefer to view real-world large objects as larger than real-world small objects, even with visual anagrams.
results from the real-world size Stroop effect with anagrams. performance is better when displayed size is congruent with real-world size.
anagrams we generated, where rotating the object changes its real-world size.
depiction of the "visual anagrams" model by Geng et al.
the mind encodes differences in real-world size. but differences in size also carry differences in shape, spatial frequency, and contrast.
a rabbit and an elephant, but they are actually the same image rotated 90 degrees.
results from experiment 3. behavior was stable across a one-year delay!
results from experiment 2. behavior was stable across a random-number-generation and a two-dimensional random-location-generation task.
results from experiment 1. behavior was stable across a random-number-generation and a one-dimensional random-location-generation task.
figure 1 from our paper, depicting various tasks
figure 3 from our paper, showing that mechanistic complexity affects performance in visual search and visual working memory tasks.
figure 2 from our paper, showing that judgments of complexity are more aligned with mechanistic complexity than visual complexity.
figure 1 from our paper, describing the tasks of our 5 experiments