tal boger

about

I am a second-year Ph.D. student advised by Chaz Firestone at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, where I also collaborate with Shari Liu.

I study visual perception and cognition, and am especially interested in exploring how the mind separates content (what something is) from form (how it appears to us).

In 2023, I graduated from Yale University, where I studied Statistics & Data Science. During this time, I was fortunate to collaborate with several different researchers, including Frank Keil (Yale), Tomer Ullman (Harvard), and Steven Franconeri (Northwestern), among others.

Beyond research, I love playing and watching basketball (and have been a lifelong Celtics fan), producing music, writing, and performing stand-up comedy.

publications

(* = equal contribution)

journal articles and refereed conference proceedings

• Boger, T.*, Yousif, S. R.*, McDougle, S. D. & Rutledge, R. B. (in press). Random behavior is stable across tasks and time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. [pdf; demos]
• Boger, T., & Strickland, B. (2025). Object persistence explains event completion. Cognition, 259, 106110. [pdf; demos]
• Boger, T., & Keil, F. C. (2025). Mechanistic complexity is fundamental: Evidence from judgments, attention, and memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 154(2), 596-606. [pdf; demos]
• Boger, T., & Franconeri, S. L. (2024). Reading a graph is like reading a paragraph. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153(7), 1699-1704. [pdf; demos]
• Li, Y., Wang, Y., Boger, T., Smith, K. A., Gershman, S. J., & Ullman, T. D. (2023). An approximate representation of objects underlies physical reasoning, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(11), 3074-3086. [pdf]
• Boger, T., & Ullman, T. D. (2023). What is "where": Physical reasoning informs object location. Open Mind, 7, 130-140. [pdf; demos]
• Hafri, A.*, Boger, T.*, & Firestone, C. (2022). Melting ice with your mind: Representational momentum for physical states. Psychological Science, 33(5), 725-735. [pdf; demos]
• Boger, T., Most, S. B., & Franconeri, S. L. (2021). Jurassic mark: Inattentional blindness for a datasaurus reveals that visualizations are explored, not seen. In 2021 IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS) (pp. 71-75). IEEE. [pdf; demos]
  • Best Short Paper Award.
• Boger, T., Ananthabhotla, I., & Paradiso, J. (2021). Manipulating causal uncertainty in sound objects. In Proceedings of the 16th International Audio Mostly Conference (pp. 9-15). [pdf]

conference presentations

• Boger, T., & Firestone, C. (2024). The psychophysics of style. Talk given at the annual meeting of the Object Perception, Attention, and Memory Conference, 11/21/2024, New York, NY.
  • Best Talk Award.
• Boger, T., & Firestone, C. (2024). The psychophysics of style. Talk given at the annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, 6/20/2024, West Lafayette, IN.
  • William James Prize.
• Boger, T., & Firestone, C. (2024). The psychophysis of style. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society, 5/18/2024, St. Pete Beach, FL.
• Franconeri, S. L., & Boger, T. (2024). When processing relationships, visual processing capacity is far less than four. Talk given at the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society, 5/18/2024, St. Pete Beach, FL.
• Hafri, A., Boger, T., & Firestone, C. (2022). Remembering the future: Representational momentum for physical states. Talk given at the annual meeting of the (European) Society for Philosophy and Psychology, 7/21/2022, Milan, Italy.
• Boger, T., & Keil, F. C. (2022). Mechanism influences intuitive object complexity. Talk given at the annual meeting of the (European) Society for Philosophy and Psychology, 7/19/2022, Milan, Italy.
• Boger, T., & Firestone, C. (2022). Automatic simulation of unseen physical events. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society, 5/17/2022, St. Pete Beach, FL.
• Boger, T., Most, S. B., & Franconeri, S. L. (2021). Jurassic mark: Inattentional blindness for a datasaurus reveals that visualizations are explored, not seen. Talk given at the annual (online) meeting of the IEEE Visualization Conference (VIS), 10/26/2021.
• Boger, T., Ananthabhotla, I., & Paradiso, J. (2021). Manipulating causal uncertainty in sound objects. Talk given at the annual (online) meeting of the Audio Mostly Conference, 9/1/2021.
• Hafri, A., Boger, T., & Firestone, C. (2021). Melting ice with your mind: Dynamic representation of physical states. Talk given at the annual (online) meeting of the Vision Sciences Society, 5/25/2021.
• Boger, T., Hafri, A., & Firestone, C. (2020). Melting ice with your mind: Representational momentum in state-space. Talk given at the annual (online) meeting othe Object Perception, Attention, and Memory Conference, 11/19/2020.