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.

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.

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.

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.

We show that individual differences in this perceptual RT asymmetry - as well as trait imagery vividness - predicts imagery RT asymmetry.

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.

🚨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...

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!

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”!

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.

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.

Setting up for our first OPM-MEG pilot tomorrow 🙀

🧠📈

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