What is Metacognition, and Why Do We Have It?
Presenter:
Dr. Megan Peters
Time:
14:52
Summary
Megan Peters is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Bioengineering at the University of California, Riverside, a cooperating faculty member in the Neuroscience Graduate Program and the Department of Psychology at UCR, and a Cooperating Researcher in the Department of Decoded Neurofeedback at Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan. She received her PhD in 2014 from UCLA. Megan’s research aims to reveal how the brain represents and uses uncertainty in perception and perceptual decision-making, including the subjective, conscious experiences that accompany these abilities. She uses psychophysics, computational models, machine learning, neuroimaging, and neurostimulation to study these topics. Megan was also recently named a CIFAR Global Scholar in the Azrieli Program for Brain, Mind & Consciousness.
Transcript
Thanks for the nice introduction. It's really my pleasure and honor to be here to talk to you all today. What a fantastic lineup, and we've already heard some really exciting work.
So I wanted to take a moment to zoom in in my talk. We've heard a lot of high level talks about what is consciousness? How does consciousness arise from the brain? And I wanted to share with you a little bit about what we've been doing to specifically ask about how consciousness arises, both neurally and computationally, in the lab, so that you can kind of get a handle on really what goes on in a research lab that tries to understand these topics. And before I'll do that, I'll just preface this by saying that it's really the great privilege to be one of the people working on this topic.
This is one of the most exciting and simultaneously frustrating topics that we could possibly be working on in science right now. So we don't even have a handle really on how to begin studying it. And so some of the things that I'll share with you today are hoping to create that handle, to create that little spark to be able to say, how can we get a grasp of the neural basis of consciousness in the lab, and what kinds of techniques will need to be developed in order for us to be able to okay?