About Me

Hey, I’m Benjy!

I am a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the MetaLab at the Functional Imaging Laboratory, UCL. My research spans all things consciousness, perception, and numerical and social cognition.

What I’ve been up to

During my fellowship, I will be working to explore the relationship between neural representations of sensory absence and more high-level, conceptual representations of absence - such as the number zero. In line with this, I am also working on the ETHOS adversarial collaboration - testing the richness of higher-order representations with Nadine Dijkstra. I am also continuing to collaborate with Jon Huntley, using neuroimaging tools to examine whether patients with Alzheimer’s Disease exhibit differences in neural correlates of conscious perception.

Throughout my PhD, I was working with Steve Fleming and Nadine Dijkstra at UCL. My research consisted of two broad streams:
1 exploring how neural magnitude codes may be shared between cognitive domains, and how they might interface with neural correlates of consciousness
2 adapting social cognition paradigms for use in naturalistic experiments and exploring the interface of social cognition and visual perception.

Before my PhD, I worked as an RA with Jon Freeman at NYU, where I used fMRI to explore how visual awareness facilitates the top-down influence of stereotypes on face perception. Before that, I completed my MSc at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science, where, supervised by Keisuke Suzuki, I combined psychophysical experiments with virtual reality models of hallucinations.