The phrase "a blank trial" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used in contexts where a trial or test is conducted without any specific parameters or conditions, often to gather baseline data or assess a system's performance.
Example: "The researchers decided to conduct a blank trial to understand the system's default behavior before introducing any variables."
Alternatives: "a control trial" or "a baseline trial".
During a blank trial the bee was placed in the experimental position for 1 min and no specific stimulus was delivered.
To ensure us that imposed airflow in the nasal cavity was completely deodorized, we included a blank trial in each recording session.
Trial 12 was followed by a "blank" trial of 1-min duration, in which the rat ran to the other side of the maze to get the food rewards, but no objects were present.
This is because even a low heralding efficiency would only lead to a higher number of blank trials but would not lead to more than a single photon being present at the subjects' cornea.
Thus, bees of the paired group had to experience 4 blank trials interspersed in a pseudorandom way with associative trials in order to equate the number of placements in the conditioned setup (8) between paired and unpaired groups.
In other words, larvae were trained either by paired presentations of AM and reward, alternated with blank trials during which an empty container was presented, or in the reciprocal case were trained by unpaired presentations of AM and reward.
Subsequently, rats were trained in a task that required discrimination of successively presented signals and "blank" trials with no signal presentation.
(d) Relative change in interval 1 responses for blank trials, that is, containing no photons (n=28,233) as a function of time to the preceding single-photon event.
In the paired group (Fig. 2a), conditioning trials were alternated with 6 blank trials.
Blank trials were used in the paired group to equate the number of contextual experiences between paired and unpaired groups.
The total number of trials in the task was 270, consisting of 120 subliminal trials (32 ms), 120 conscious trials (80 ms) and 30 blank trials (80 ms).
