I am a cognitive scientist working at the border of cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, cognitive neuroscience, and theoretical consciousness science. My work asks how attention, expectation, embodiment, and inference shape what appears to us as a world — and what this reveals about awareness itself.
My empirical work examines how attention and expectation shape conscious perception. Across inattentional blindness, change blindness, expectation-driven illusory reports, time perception, and predictive processing, the central question is not merely what we perceive, but how a world becomes available to a finite subject.
Work on inattentional blindness, change blindness, iconic memory, and awareness asks whether sensory information becomes conscious without attention, and what attention contributes to perceptual presence.
A line of experiments investigating whether strong expectations can generate reports of absent stimuli under inattention — including letters, colour patches, faces, and ongoing extensions into audition and touch.
A theoretical framework connecting perceptual expectation, precision, active inference, and conscious experience: perception as controlled construction rather than passive reception.
Awareness-First Theory, or AFT, begins from a simple but radical thought: awareness is not a late product inside an already mindless universe, but the primordial field within which any world, body, object, measurement, or explanation can appear. Finite subjects are bounded local organisations — subbeings — within a wider field of appearing.
The theoretical programme develops a bridge between Parmenidean ontology, phenomenology, the Free Energy Principle, information geometry, and the science of perception. It asks whether physical law, inference, and conscious worldhood can be understood as nested coherence constraints within awareness.
Instead of asking how consciousness emerges from non-conscious matter, AFT asks how structured worlds emerge within awareness. The explanatory direction is reversed: awareness is not what must be produced; it is the field in which production, explanation, evidence, and worldhood are possible.
Recent doctoral and postgraduate work extends expectation awareness across sensory modalities and neural measures, testing whether expected but absent events can be consciously reported under conditions of inattention.
Doctoral work has extended earlier face-expectation experiments, including evidence consistent with face-sensitive neural processing under conditions where an expected face is absent and attention is otherwise engaged.
Current projects examine whether expectation-driven reports of absent stimuli generalise beyond vision into audition and touch, developing a broader multimodal account of expectation-shaped conscious perception.
This section can be populated with full citation details, downloadable papers, preprints, conference posters, and forthcoming manuscripts.
A book-length synthesis of attention, expectation, predictive processing, and conscious perception.
Empirical work on absent but expected stimuli, perceptual reports, and the boundaries between perception, imagery, and hallucination.
A theoretical paper positioning awareness as the field within which inference, worldhood, and physical law are articulated.
Research on whether semantic incongruity captures awareness under attention-demanding conditions.
Alongside academic work, this site can host public-facing essays on consciousness, Being, imagination, perception, active inference, Berkeley Square, and the role of world-generation in science, fiction, play, and human life.
Essays that begin with the explanatory gap and ask whether the problem changes if awareness is treated as ontologically primary rather than emergent.
Work on imagination as constrained generative simulation: fiction, play, acting, inner worlds, and the deep continuity between perception and creation.
Accessible lessons on manifolds, fibre bundles, information geometry, free energy, and the mathematical language needed to describe structured appearing.
I am interested in conversations with researchers working on perception, attention, expectation, predictive processing, active inference, consciousness science, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and the mathematics of world-generation.