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The neuronal mechanisms that serve to distinguish between light-emitting and light reflecting objects are largely unknown. It has been suggested that luminosity perception implements a separate pathway in the visual system, such that…
We develop an effective perturbation theory (and, equivalently, a bias expansion) for the inhomogeneous 21cm radiation field from reionization. Using large-scale simulations of cosmological reionization, we find that this expansion…
Many cosmological models assume or imply that the total size of the universe is very large, perhaps even infinite. Here we argue instead that the universe might be comparatively small, in fact not much larger than the currently observed…
In general relativity, a gravitational horizon (more commonly known as the "apparent horizon") is an imaginary surface beyond which all null geodesics recede from the observer. The Universe has an apparent (gravitational) horizon, but…
By comparing biological and artificial perception through the lens of illusions, we highlight critical differences in how each system constructs visual reality. Understanding these divergences can inform the development of more robust,…
The hypothesis of lunar origin by a single giant impact can explain some aspects of the Earth-Moon system. However, it is difficult to reconcile giant impact models with the compositional similarity of the Earth and Moon without violating…
The biological characteristics of human visual processing can be investigated through the study of optical illusions and their perception, giving rise to intuitions that may improve computer vision to match human performance. Geometric…
Whether large predictive models merely parrot their training data or produce genuine insight lacks a physical explanation. This work reports a primitive form of intuition that emerges as a metastable phase of learning that critically…
Recent studies on interpretability of attention distributions have led to notions of faithful and plausible explanations for a model's predictions. Attention distributions can be considered a faithful explanation if a higher attention…
Consciousness is an explicit outcome of brain activity. However, the link between consciousness and the material world remains to be explored. We applied a new logic tool, the non-identity law, to the analysis of the visual dynamics related…
Void models provide a possible explanation of the "accelerated expansion" of the Universe without dark energy. To make the conventional void models more realistic, we allow the void, an underdense region around us, to be anisotropic and…
Earth is unusual in bearing life, and in having a large moon. A number of authors have suggested a possible connection between the two, e.g. through lunar stabilisation of the earth's obliquity, or through the effects of the oceanic tides.…
The Hubble diagram is one of the cornerstones of observational cosmology. It is usually analysed assuming that, on average, the underlying relation between magnitude and redshift matches the prediction of a…
As part of human core knowledge, the representation of objects is the building block of mental representation that supports high-level concepts and symbolic reasoning. While humans develop the ability of perceiving objects situated in 3D…
Test-time compute has empowered multimodal large language models to generate extended reasoning chains, yielding strong performance on tasks such as multimodal math reasoning. However, this improved reasoning ability often comes with…
Scatterplots can encode a third dimension by using additional channels like size or color (e.g. bubble charts). We explore a potential misinterpretation of trivariate scatterplots, which we call the weighted average illusion, where…
The giant impact hypothesis is the dominant theory explaining the formation of our Moon. However, its inability to produce an isotopically similar Earth-Moon system with correct angular momentum has cast a shadow on its validity.…
Hallucination is often viewed as a direct consequence of missing knowledge: a model answers incorrectly when the correct answer is absent from its generation-time distribution, and correctly when it is present. We test this assumption by…
In the film industry, the same movie is expected to be watched on displays of vastly different sizes, from cinema screens to mobile phones. But visual induction, the perceptual phenomenon by which the appearance of a scene region is…
The multiple impact hypothesis proposes that the Moon formed through a series of smaller collisions, rather than a single giant impact. This study advances our understanding of this hypothesis, as well as moon collisions in other contexts,…