Distinct neural representations of perceptual and numerical absence in the human brain.

Numerical absence (zero) is decoded with shared neural representations across symbolic and non-symbolic formats, but those representations are distinct from non-numerical perceptual absences in the human brain.

• Why it matters: It is unclear whether the brain uses overlapping or separate codes for lacking sensory evidence versus the conceptual idea of zero, limiting understanding of how absence is represented.
• What they did: Participants performed three tasks while magnetoencephalography recorded brain activity; multivariate decoding and Bayes factor analyses tested whether numerical and non-numerical absences share representational patterns.
• The result: Shared representations of numerical absence across symbolic and non-symbolic formats are replicated, yet they differ from non-numerical absences even after controlling for stimulus-level confounds, refining the perception–cognition boundary for absence.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.