tal boger

about

I am a third-year Ph.D. student advised by Chaz Firestone at the Johns Hopkins University Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences.

I study visual perception and cognition, with a special focus on how the mind separates content (what something is or what it represents) from form (how it appears to us or how it is formatted).

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.

Some of my current collaborators include Shari Liu (JHU) and Sami Yousif (OSU).

Beyond research, I love 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., & Firestone, C. (2025). The psychophysics of style. Nature Human Behaviour, 9(12), 2497-2509. [pdf; data; demos]
  • Check out a "Spotlight" of this paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, written by Aenne Brielmann.
• Boger, T., & Firestone, C. (2025). Visual anagrams reveal high-level effects with 'identical' stimuli. Current Biology, 35(19), PR910-PR912. [pdf; data; demos; merch]
• Boger, T.*, Yousif, S. R.*, McDougle, S. D. & Rutledge, R. B. (2025). Random behavior is stable across tasks and time. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 154(6), 1571-1582. [pdf; data; demos]
• Boger, T., & Strickland, B. (2025). Object persistence explains event completion. Cognition, 259, 106110. [pdf; data; 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; data; 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; data; 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; data]
• Boger, T., & Ullman, T. D. (2023). What is "where": Physical reasoning informs object location. Open Mind, 7, 130-140. [pdf; data; 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; data; 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., & Liu, S. (2025). Who drew this? Children appreciate visual style differently than adults. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 8/2/2025, San Francisco, CA.
• Boger, T., & Firestone, C. (2025). Complexity is a unified cognitive kind. Talk given at the annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, 6/19/2025, Ithaca, NY.
• Liu, S., Firestone, C., & Boger, T. (2025). Who drew this? Children appreciate visual style differently than adults. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society, 5/20/2025, St. Pete Beach, FL.
• Boger, T., Liu, S., & Firestone, C. (2025). Complexity is a cognitive universal: Evidence from cross-modal transfer. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society, 5/17/2025, St. Pete Beach, FL.
• Firestone, C., & Boger, T. (2025). Controlling for everything: Canonical size effects with identical stimuli. Talk given at the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society, 5/17/2025, St. Pete Beach, FL.
• 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 psychophysics 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.

teaching

I have actively pursued teaching opportunities during my graduate career. In addition to TA’ing, I have designed two instructional experiences for undergraduate students.

In the fall of 2025, I gave a lecture to JHU's nearly 500-person Introduction to Psychology class about the psychology of music, much to the students' surprise.

In January of 2026, I created and led an "intersession" (the period between the fall and spring semesters) course called "The art of information: Information-theoretic approaches to psychology and art". The course (which met every day for 2 weeks) synthesized psychology, information theory, and art. I created a website for the course (for posting slides, readings, etc.) — so, you can learn more about the course here.