OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
How much, how high, how fast, how many? We routinely evaluate information based on abstractions of magnitude, be it in our everyday judgments or in psychophysical experiments. In this talk, I will address in particular two questions: (i) how is magnitude information kept in working memory (WM), and (ii) how do humans integrate abstract magnitude in comparative decisions? I will review evidence that keeping stimulus information ‘active’ in WM can involve high-level representations of magnitude in frontal areas, even in putatively simple psychophysical tasks. These findings will be discussed in light of contemporary models of WM function and therein, I will outline a potential role of beta-oscillations in endogenous content updating. In the second part of my talk, I will present new evidence for human biases in integrating numerical magnitude in decision making. One study showed that during comparison of approximate number, the weight of sequential inputs is not constant, but fluctuates at the rhythm of endogenous low-frequency signals over parietal cortex. Lastly, I will illustrate a novel, systematic bias in numerical comparisons, which, paradoxically, may act to maximise accuracy in human observers.