Biology subjects

Firestone, C.

Publications and source records attributed to Firestone, C..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Perceiving animacy in 'identical' images

Some objects appear animate (e.g., dogs and elephants) while others do not (e.g., boots and sofas). This distinction pervades human cognition, with an expansive literature reporting striking effects of animacy on vision, memory, social perception, and neural organization. But studies of perceived animacy face a persistent challenge: Objects that differ in animacy tend to differ in many lower-level visual features (e.g., shape, texture, spatial frequency). Thus, it remains controversial whether animacy per se -- as opposed to its lower-level correlates -- drives visual processing. Here, we achieve previously unattainable levels of experimental control to demonstrate that the visual system represents animacy itself, beyond its lower-level covariates. We vary animacy while holding nearly all lower-level features constant by exploiting "visual anagrams" -- a diffusion-based technique for generating static images whose interpretations change radically with orientation. Eight pre-registered experiments leverage this approach to demonstrate that representations of animacy structure visual working memory and guide visual attention. Thus, the visual system extracts animacy itself, beyond its lower-level correlates.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Guessing reveals internal models of perceptual precision

When observers lack sufficient information to support a confident response, they often guess. Guessing plays a pervasive role in visual cognition and working memory, yet the mechanisms that govern how observers generate guesses remain poorly understood. Standard models traditionally assume that responses produced in the absence of information are either uniformly distributed over feature space or are perhaps weighted towards prevailing environmental statistics. In contrast, here we consider an intriguing alternative: that guesses incorporate observers knowledge of their own perceptual capacities. We empirically measured guessing by eliciting responses under extreme target uncertainty (Experiment 1) as well as a novel "0ms presentation" approach in which no stimulus appeared but subjects believed one had (Experiment 2). We evaluated three accounts of guesses under these conditions: unsystematic (lapse) responding, biases toward environmental statistics, and a self-representational account in which guesses reflect observers knowledge of their own feature-dependent precision (e.g., preferring to guess feature values they believe they would be likely to miss). Guess responses were non-uniform and systematically biased toward feature values typically encoded with the least precision (e.g., oblique orientations) -- a counterintuitive bias away from high-frequency, high-fidelity feature values (e.g., cardinal orientations). This complementary relationship between guessing and perceptual fidelity held within individuals and across paradigms, and was recoverable via an empirical-guess mixture model that replaced the standard uniform assumption with empirically measured guess distributions. Our findings challenge prevailing views that guesses reflect random noise, and suggest instead that guessing behavior reflects metacognitive knowledge of internal precision. Rather than defaulting to environmental priors, observers appear to model their own sensory limitations and leverage these representations to inform decisions in the absence of evidence. These results reframe guessing as a theoretically informative behavior that expresses observers own beliefs about their perceptual capacities. SignificanceGuessing is commonly treated as random noise in models of perception and memory, assumed to reflect lapses or uninformed responses. Instead, we show that human guesses are systematically structured across feature space: observers preferentially guess values they typically encode with the least precision, revealing a consistent, strategic bias away from high-fidelity representations. By directly measuring guess behavior on stimulus-absent trials and integrating these empirical distributions into a mixture model, we find that guesses on stimulus-present trials can be systematically recovered, and that they too form the complement of perceptual precision. These findings challenge foundational psychophysical modeling assumptions and position guessing as a strategic, informative behavior that engages self-representation.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Sensitivity to visual features in inattentional blindness

The relation between attention, perception and awareness is among the most fundamental problems in the science of the mind. One of the most striking and well-known phenomena bearing on this question is inattentional blindness (IB; Neisser & Becklen, 1975; Mack & Rock, 1998; Most et al., 2001, 2005). In IB, naive observers fail to report clearly visible stimuli when their attention is otherwise engaged--famously even missing a gorilla parading before their eyes (Simons & Chabris, 1999). This phenomenon and the research programs it has motivated carry tremendous theoretical significance, both as crucial evidence that awareness requires attention (Cohen et al., 2012; Prinz, 2012; Noah & Mangun, 2020) and as a key tool in seeking the neural correlates of consciousness (Rees et al., 1999; Pitts et al., 2014; Hutchinson, 2019). However, these and other implications critically rest on a notoriously biased measure: asking participants whether they noticed anything unusual (and interpreting negative answers as reflecting a complete lack of perception). Here, in the largest ever set of IB studies, we show that, as a group, inattentionally blind participants can successfully report the location, color and shape of the stimuli they deny noticing. This residual visual sensitivity shows that perceptual information remains accessible in IB. We further show that subjective reports in IB are conservative, by introducing absent trials where no IB stimulus is presented; this approach allows us to show for the first time that observers collectively show a systematic bias to report not noticing in IB--essentially playing it safe in reporting their sensitivity. This pair of results is consistent with an alternative hypothesis about IB, namely that inattentionally blind subjects retain some degree of awareness of the stimuli they fail to report. Overall, these data provide the strongest evidence to date of significant residual visual sensitivity in IB. They also challenge the use of inattentional blindness to argue that awareness requires attention.

neuroscience↗