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

[!] I am looking for a post-doc to start in Autumn 2025. Please get in touch if you’d be interested in collaborating!

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 interested in behavioural signatures that might indicate zero has a unique cognitive representation amongst numbers. 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.