Paranoid and teleological thinking give rise to distinct social hallucinations in vision.

Paranoia (believing others intend harm) and excess teleological thinking (ascribing too much purpose) are non-consensual beliefs about agents. Human vision rapidly detects agents and their intentions. Might paranoia and teleology have roots in visual perception? Using displays that evoke the impression that one disc ('wolf') is chasing another ('sheep'), we find that paranoia and teleology involve perceiving chasing when there is none (studies 1 and 2) - errors we characterize as social hallucinations.

When New Experience Leads to New Knowledge: A Computational Framework for Formalizing Epistemically Transformative Experiences.

The discovery of a new kind of experience can teach an agent what that kind of experience is like. Such a discovery can be epistemically transformative, teaching an agent something they could not have learned without having that kind of experience. However, learning something new does not always require new experience.

Visual event boundaries trigger forgetting despite active maintenance in visual working memory.

The contents of visual perception are inherently dynamic-just as we experience objects in space, so too events in time. The boundaries between these events have downstream consequences. For example, memory for incidentally encountered items is impaired when walking through a doorway, perhaps because event boundaries serve as cues to clear obsolete information from previous events.

People's thinking plans adapt to the problem they're trying to solve.

Much of our thinking focuses on deciding what to do in situations where the space of possible options is too large to evaluate exhaustively. Previous work has found that people do this by learning the general value of different behaviors, and prioritizing thinking about high-value options in new situations. Is this good-action bias always the best strategy, or can thinking about low-value options sometimes become more beneficial? Can people adapt their thinking accordingly based on the situation? And how do we know what to think about in novel events? Here, we developed a block-puzzle paradigm that enabled us to measure people's thinking plans and compare them to a computational model of rational thought.

Visual event boundaries restrict anchoring effects in decision-making.

Research on higher-level thought has revealed many principles of reasoning and decision-making but has rarely made contact with how we perceive the world in the first place. Here we show how a lower-level property of perception-the spontaneous and task-irrelevant segmentation of continuous visual stimulation into discrete events-can restrict one of the most notorious biases in decision-making: numerical anchoring. Subjects walked down a long room in an immersive three dimensional (3D) animation and then made a numerical judgment (e.

What's next?: Time is subjectively dilated not only for 'oddball' events, but also for events immediately after oddballs.

Our experience of time is strikingly plastic: Depending on contextual factors, the same objective duration can seem to fly by or drag on. Perhaps the most direct demonstration of such subjective time dilation is the oddball effect: when seeing identical objects appear one after another, followed by an "oddball" (e.g.

Event segmentation structures temporal experience: Simultaneous dilation and contraction in rhythmic reproductions.

We experience the world in terms of both (continuous) time and (discrete) events, but time seems especially primitive-since we cannot perceive events without an underlying temporal medium. It is all the more intriguing, then, to discover that event segmentation can itself influence how we perceive the passage of time. We demonstrated this using a novel "rhythmic reproduction" task, in which people listened to irregular sequences of musical tones, and then immediately reproduced those rhythmic patterns from memory.

Excessive teleological thinking is driven by aberrant associations and not by failure of reasoning.

Teleological thought - the tendency to ascribe purpose to objects and events - is useful in some cases (encouraging explanation-seeking), but harmful in others (fueling delusions and conspiracy theories). What drives excessive and maladaptive teleological thinking? In causal learning, there is a fundamental distinction between associative learning versus learning via propositional mechanisms. Here, we propose that directly contrasting the contributions of these two pathways can elucidate the roots of excess teleology.

Here it comes: Active forgetting triggered even just by anticipation of an impending event boundary.

Visual input arrives in a continuous stream, but we often experience the world as a sequence of discrete events - and the boundaries between events have important consequences for our mental lives. Perhaps the best example of this is that memory not only declines as a function of elapsed time, but is also impaired when crossing an event boundary - as when walking through a doorway. (This impairment may be adaptive, as when one "flushes" a cache in a computer program when completing a function.

Memorable beginnings, but forgettable endings: Intrinsic memorability alters our subjective experience of time.

Time is the fabric of experience - yet it is incredibly malleable in the mind of the observer: seeming to drag on, or fly right by at different moments. One of the most influential drivers of temporal distortions is , where heightened attention dilates subjective time. But an equally important feature of subjective experience involves not just the objects of attention, but also what information will naturally be remembered or forgotten, independent of attention (i.

What moves us? The intrinsic memorability of dance.

Our most moving experiences, the ones that "stick," are hardly ever static but are dynamic, like a conversation, a gesture, or a dance. Previous work has shown robust memory for simple actions (e.g.

Hallucinating visual structure: Individual differences in 'scaffolded attention'.

Our percepts usually derive their structure from particular cues in the incoming sensory information, but this is not so in the phenomenon of scaffolded attention - where shifting patterns of attention give rise to 'everyday hallucinations' of visual structure even in the absence of sensory cues. When looking at a piece of graph paper, for example, the squares are all identical - yet many people see a shifting array of structured patterns such as lines, crosses, or even block-letters - something that doesn't occur when staring at a blank page. We have informally noted that scaffolded attention is a widely but not universally shared phenomenon - with some people spontaneously experiencing such percepts (even without instruction), others seeing such 'phantom' structures only when actively trying to so, and still others never having such experiences at all.

Scaffolded attention in time: 'Everyday hallucinations' of rhythmic patterns from regular auditory beats.

A regular grid (e.g. on a piece of graph paper) is made up of squares which (by definition) have no structure.

Enumeration in time is irresistibly event-based.

One of the most fundamental questions that can be asked about any process concerns the underlying units over which it operates. And this is true not just for artificial processes (such as functions in a computer program that only take specific kinds of arguments) but for mental processes. Over what units does the process of enumeration operate? Recent work has demonstrated that in visuospatial arrays, these units are often irresistibly discrete objects.

How to Create Objects With Your Mind: From Object-Based Attention to Attention-Based Objects.

When staring at a blank grid, one can readily "see" simple shapes-a peculiar experience that does not occur when viewing an empty background. But just what does this "seeing" entail? Previous work has explored many cues to (e.g.

Did that just happen? Event segmentation influences enumeration and working memory for simple overlapping visual events.

For working memory to be efficient, it is important not only to remember, but also to forget-thus freeing up memory for additional information. But what triggers forgetting? Beyond continuous temporal decay, memory is thought to be effectively 'flushed' to some degree at discrete event boundaries-i.e.