Faculty Expert Profile

Chaz Firestone explores how perception -- our means of contact with the external world -- interacts with the rest of the mind.

Recent work explored the how humans perceive silence, and how humans perceive what others are trying to learn.

His lab has explored how our minds generate physical intuitions about the world (e.g., how we come to understand that a tower of blocks will topple or a stack of dishes will collapse), and how such intuitions may be underwritten by more basic operations of visual attention and memory. The lab also has interests in long-standing foundational questions about the nature of perception, including how higher-level cognitive factors such as language, desire, emotion, and action can (and cannot) influence what we see.