Distinct neural representations of perceptual and numerical absence in the human brain
5 affiliations
- 1Department of Imaging Neuroscience, University College London, London, United Kingdom
- 2School of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck, University of London, London, United Kingdom
- 3Department of Experimental Psychology and Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, United Kingdom
- 4Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, University College London, London, United Kingdom
- 5Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Brain, Mind and Consciousness Program, Toronto, Canada
Abstract
The ability to represent absences is fundamental to human perception and cognition. Sensitivity to non-numerical absences depends on inferring a lack of sensory evidence, enabling the recognition of a lack of environmental resources or other objects. In turn, encoding numerical absence as a concept – in the form of the number zero – has enabled a multitude of technological and mathematical advances. Whether perceptual and conceptual absences rely on overlapping or distinct neural representations in the human brain, however, remains unknown. We employed three different tasks together with magnetoencephalography to characterise neural representations of absence evoked within perceptual and numerical domains. Using multivariate decoding and Bayes factor analyses, we replicate previous findings of shared representations of numerical absence across symbolic and non-symbolic formats. In contrast, we show that these representations of numerical absence are distinct from those evoked by non-numerical absences. This result held even after controlling for stimulus-level confounds which generate surface-level similarities between perceptual absences and non-symbolic empty sets. Our results extend a boundary between perception and cognition to the domain of absence and provide insight into the different mechanisms employed by the human brain to both perceive and conceive of absences.
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BibTeX
@article{barnett2026distinct,
title = {{Distinct neural representations of perceptual and numerical absence in the human brain}},
author = {Benjy Barnett and Stephen M Fleming},
journal = {eLife},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.7554/elife.112088},
url = {https://elifesciences.org/articles/112088},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
TI - Distinct neural representations of perceptual and numerical absence in the human brain
AU - Benjy Barnett
AU - Stephen M Fleming
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/05
JO - eLife
DO - 10.7554/elife.112088
UR - https://elifesciences.org/articles/112088
AB - The ability to represent absences is fundamental to human perception and cognition. Sensitivity to non-numerical absences depends on inferring a lack of sensory evidence, enabling the recognition of a lack of environmental resources or other objects. In turn, encoding numerical absence as a concept – in the form of the number zero – has enabled a multitude of technological and mathematical advances. Whether perceptual and conceptual absences rely on overlapping or distinct neural representations in the human brain, however, remains unknown. We employed three different tasks together with magnetoencephalography to characterise neural representations of absence evoked within perceptual and numerical domains. Using multivariate decoding and Bayes factor analyses, we replicate previous findings of shared representations of numerical absence across symbolic and non-symbolic formats. In contrast, we show that these representations of numerical absence are distinct from those evoked by non-numerical absences. This result held even after controlling for stimulus-level confounds which generate surface-level similarities between perceptual absences and non-symbolic empty sets. Our results extend a boundary between perception and cognition to the domain of absence and provide insight into the different mechanisms employed by the human brain to both perceive and conceive of absences.
SN - 2050-084X
ER -