barlow is a fellow of trinity college, university of cambridge. he was elected a fellow of the royal society in 1969 and was awarded their royal medal in 1993. he received the 1993 australia prize for his research into the mechanisms of visual perception and the 2009 swartz prize for theoretical and computational neuroscience from the society for neuroscience. he was awarded the first ken nakayama prize from the vision sciences society in 2016.