[SydPhil] Fwd: firestone talk tomorrow at 3

[Kristie Miller]

Chaz Firestone of Johns Hopkins University is a philosophy-influenced cognitive psychologist and will speak tomorrow Friday 23 March at 3pm in Heydon Laurence LT217. There will be drinks after.  He will present:

Seeing Stability: Physical understanding is rooted in automatic visual processing
We can readily appreciate whether a tower of blocks will topple or a stack of dishes will collapse. How? How are we able to interpret observable physical events in terms of the unobservable physical forces underlying them? Both classic and contemporary work on this question has typically treated this sort of physical understanding as a species of higher-level cognition — akin to deriving the solution to a physics riddle through reasoning and calculation. This talk will explore a very different possibility: that such inferences (such as whether a tower of blocks will topple) are rooted in automatic visual processing, such that understanding a physical scene may work less like working through a problem in physics class, and more like seeing a color. I will present experimental evidence that physical scene understanding is spontaneous (occurring even when irrelevant to one’s task), fast (arising ‘fully formed’ in less than 100ms exposure to a scene), reflexive (being surprisingly intransigent to one’s explicit beliefs), attention-grabbing (determining what we may become aware of), and even phenomenologically distinctive (creating illusions of motion, such that a precarious tower may subtly appear to be falling over). I conclude that we can not only calculate, reason about, and simulate physical forces, but also see them.


Associate Professor Kristie Miller
ARC Future Fellow
Joint Director, the Centre for Time
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry and
The Centre for Time
The University of Sydney
Sydney Australia
Room S212, A 14


kmiller at usyd.edu.au
kristie_miller at yahoo.com
Ph: +612 9036 9663
https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/8oV8ClxwB5C6MprGfGpY4_?domain=kristiemiller.net



















> Begin forwarded message:
> 
> From: Alex Holcombe <alex.holcombe at sydney.edu.au>
> Subject: firestone talk tomorrow at 3
> Date: 22 March 2018 at 6:55:27 am AEDT
> To: Kristie Miller <kristie_miller at yahoo.com>
> 
> Hi Kristie, I hope you might be interested in attending this and know some people to send this announcement to:
> Chaz Firestone of Johns Hopkins University is a philosophy-influenced cognitive psychologist and will speak tomorrow Friday 23 March at 3pm in Heydon Laurence LT217. There will be drinks after.  He will present:
> Seeing Stability: Physical understanding is rooted in automatic visual processing
> We can readily appreciate whether a tower of blocks will topple or a stack of dishes will collapse. How? How are we able to interpret observable physical events in terms of the unobservable physical forces underlying them? Both classic and contemporary work on this question has typically treated this sort of physical understanding as a species of higher-level cognition — akin to deriving the solution to a physics riddle through reasoning and calculation. This talk will explore a very different possibility: that such inferences (such as whether a tower of blocks will topple) are rooted in automatic visual processing, such that understanding a physical scene may work less like working through a problem in physics class, and more like seeing a color. I will present experimental evidence that physical scene understanding is spontaneous (occurring even when irrelevant to one’s task), fast (arising ‘fully formed’ in less than 100ms exposure to a scene), reflexive (being surprisingly intransigent to one’s explicit beliefs), attention-grabbing (determining what we may become aware of), and even phenomenologically distinctive (creating illusions of motion, such that a precarious tower may subtly appear to be falling over). I conclude that we can not only calculate, reason about, and simulate physical forces, but also see them.
>  
>  
>  
> -- 
> Alex Holcombe, Professor
> Honours coordinator,
> School of Psychology | Faculty of Science
> THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY Web <http://www.psych.usyd.edu.au/staff/alexh/lab/>, Twitter <https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/vqkTCmOxDQtkMDxXCOVB40?domain=twitter.com>, Map <https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/yAJDCnxyErCrWjEwUNo2AE?domain=openwetware.org>
> Co-director, the Centre for Time <http://sydney.edu.au/centre_for_time/>
> Associate Editor, Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science <https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/efEpCoVzGQi6wZn9f63AyH?domain=psychologicalscience.org>
> PsyOA.org <https://protect-au.mimecast.com/s/081xCp8AJQtpwK2kTJdhV6?domain=psyoa.org>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.sydney.edu.au/pipermail/sydphil/attachments/20180322/17e6f39d/attachment-0001.html>