Megan Peters
About
Megan Peters draws on insights and approaches from cognitive science, psychology, computational neuroscience, and philosophy to understand how brains process and evaluate sensory information.
She is particularly interested in adaptive behaviour and learning. Using computational modeling and neuroimaging techniques, she asks questions like: How is noisy, ambiguous information represented in neuronal activity and neural connections? How does a brain know about or metacognitively evaluate its own noise, or “feel” confident that it has interpreted incoming information correctly? How does it learn what to expect based on past experience, and when to update those expectations? What can we learn from human and animal neural processing that will be beneficial to the development of artificial systems? Which brain areas and computations for all these abilities also give rise to our phenomenological, subjective experiences? That is, why and how is there something that it’s like to be conscious of our world and ourselves?
Awards
- National Eye Institute Early Career Scientist Travel Award, 2019
- Organization for Human Brain Mapping Merit Abstract Award, 2017
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, 2010
- National Institute of Health Behavioral Neuroscience Training Fellowship, 2009
- University of California, Los Angeles Chancellor’s Prize, 2009
Relevant Publications
- Michel, M. et al., (2019). Opportunities and challenges for a maturing science of consciousness. Nature Human Behaviour, 3, 104-107.
- Peters, M.A.K., Thesen, T., Ko, Y.D., Maniscalco, B., et al. (2017). Perceptual confidence neglects decision-incongruent evidence in the brain. Nature Human Behavior, 1(0139), 1-8. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-017-0139
- Peters, M.A.K., Fesi, J., Amendi, N., Knotts, J.D., et al. (2017). Transcranial magnetic stimulation to visual cortex induces suboptimal introspection. Cortex, 93, 119-132. DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2017.05.017.
- Peters, M.A.K., Kentridge, R.W., Phillips, I., & Block, N. (2017). Does unconscious perception really exist? Continuing the ASSC20 debate. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2017(1),DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/nc/nix015
- Peters, M.A.K., & Lau, H. (2015). Human observers have optimal introspective access to perceptual processes even for visually masked stimuli. eLife, 4: e09651.
Support Us
CIFAR is a registered charitable organization supported by the governments of Canada, Alberta and Quebec, as well as foundations, individuals, corporations and Canadian and international partner organizations.