Cognitive neuroscience · Durham University

How reward and expectation shape what we notice.

I am Kevin Backhouse, a PhD student in Cognitive Neuroscience at Durham University. I study how reward and expectation shape what we become aware of, where we look, and what we remember.

My research asks when people prioritise information that fits their expectations, when they prioritise the unexpected, and how learning about reward shifts that balance.

Explore the research

Collaborative research

From human perception
to artificial agents.

Alongside my PhD, I collaborate on CPOMDP, developing and evaluating artificial agents within the active inference framework.

About CPOMDP

From the notebook

What makes information
worth noticing?

The question connecting reward, expectation and my PhD research.

Read the note