Benjy Barnett
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benjyb.bsky.social
Benjy Barnett
@benjyb.bsky.social
Post doc in the Uncertainty Lab at Birkbeck University. Consciousness + everything that might mean.
Moreover, this was in spite of low-level visual similarities between perceptual and non-symbolic absences, which could otherwise drive spurious generalisation between the two domains.
July 25, 2025 at 9:23 AM
We built on these results to study how numerical and perceptual absences related to each other – finding surprisingly strong evidence for distinct neural representations of different types of absence.
July 25, 2025 at 9:23 AM
To characterise the brain’s representation of various absences, we had participants perform three different tasks in the MEG scanner, each involving absence from a different domain: perceptual, non-symbolic numerosity, and symbolic number.
July 25, 2025 at 9:23 AM
What do the music of Miles Davis, the paintings of Edward Hopper, and the equations of Isaac Newton have in common? They all rely – in different ways – on absences.
July 25, 2025 at 9:23 AM
We show that individual differences in this perceptual RT asymmetry - as well as trait imagery vividness - predicts imagery RT asymmetry.
July 21, 2025 at 2:57 PM
A similar effect has been widely reported in perceptual detection - where reporting not seeing a stimulus takes more time than reporting that you saw it.
July 21, 2025 at 2:57 PM
🚨New preprint🚨 out with the dream team @matanmazor.bsky.social @giuliacabbai.bsky.social and @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social!

We report a novel and robust effect across five different datasets: vivid imagery is reported faster than weak imagery.

📝: osf.io/preprints/ps...
July 21, 2025 at 2:57 PM
Finally, source reconstruction revealed abstract representations of zero were located in posterior parietal cortex – the same region often found to house notation-independent representations of non-zero numbers!
January 30, 2024 at 5:49 PM
We also found that representations of empty sets (an absence of dots) could be used to decode representations of symbolic zero. Moreover, this format-invariant representation of zero was situated on an abstract number line, with empty sets being more overlapping with symbolic “1” than symbolic “5”!
January 30, 2024 at 5:47 PM
We found that in both symbolic and non-symbolic tasks, numbers zero to five were represented on a neural number line beginning at zero. This was true even when zero was presented as an empty set – i.e. an absence of dots on a screen.
January 30, 2024 at 5:47 PM
But how is this done? To begin to answer this question, we asked how neural representations of zero measured using MEG relate to representations of other numbers (from 1-5). We did this for both symbolic (eg “0”) and non-symbolic (empty sets) absences.
January 30, 2024 at 5:46 PM
Setting up for our first OPM-MEG pilot tomorrow 🙀

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October 19, 2023 at 1:20 PM
hello hello - a little bluesky intro - i'm a PhD student working on a bunch of things centred on #consciousness - mostly NCCs with a dash of social and numerical cognition.

In my free time I'm probably looking at birds 🦆

#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky
September 25, 2023 at 8:55 AM