Publications by authors named "Tal Boger"

What makes an object ? Complexity comes in many different forms. Some objects are complex but simple (e.g.

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Vision provides rapid processing for some tasks, but encounters strong constraints from others. Although many tasks encounter a capacity limit of processing four visual objects at once, some evidence suggests far lower limits for processing relationships among objects. What is our capacity limit for relational processing? If it is indeed limited, then people may miss important relationships between data values in a graph.

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A central puzzle the visual system tries to solve is: "what is where?" While a great deal of research attempts to model object recognition ("what"), a comparatively smaller body of work seeks to model object location ("where"), especially in perceiving everyday objects. How do people locate an object, right now, in front of them? In three experiments collecting over 35,000 judgements on stimuli spanning different levels of realism (line drawings, real images, and crude forms), participants clicked "where" an object is, as if pointing to it. We modeled their responses with eight different methods, including both human response-based models (judgements of physical reasoning, spatial memory, free-response "click anywhere" judgements, and judgements of where people would grab the object), and image-based models (uniform distributions over the image, convex hull, saliency map, and medial axis).

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People make fast and reasonable predictions about the physical behavior of everyday objects. To do so, people may use principled mental shortcuts, such as object simplification, similar to models developed by engineers for real-time physical simulations. We hypothesize that people use simplified object approximations for tracking and action (the representation), as opposed to fine-grained forms for visual recognition (the representation).

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When a log burns, it transforms from a block of wood into a pile of ash. Such state changes are among the most dramatic ways objects change, going beyond mere changes of position or orientation. How does the mind represent changes of state? A foundational result in visual cognition is that memory extrapolates the positions of moving objects-a distortion called .

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