Séminaire ayant lieu dans le cadre du Doctorat en informatique cognitive, en alliance avec le centre de recherche CRIA  

Titre : Confidence, Metacognition, and the "Hard Problem" of Consciousness

Megan PETERS

Jeudi le 11 septembre 2025 10h30

Local PK-5115 (Il est possible d'y assister en virtuel en vous inscrivant ici)  

Résumé

Conscious feeling---the "hard problem"---remains a central challenge for cognitive science. This talk explores whether computational models of metacognitive confidence and uncertainty, grounded in introspective psychophysics and higher-order representations, can illuminate phenomenal experience. I will discuss recent work showing how the brain encodes uncertainty, how confidence can be modeled computationally, and how subjective reports can be formalized. These approaches point toward canonical computations linking perception, decision-making, and metacognition, offering a possible path to studying subjective experience---and perhaps a way to rethink the hard problem itself.

Biographie 

Megan PETERS is Associate Professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine, with an affiliation in Logic and Philosophy of Science, and is a Fellow of the CIFAR Brain, Mind & Consciousness program. Her research investigates how the brain represents and uses uncertainty, how these computations support metacognitive evaluations of perceptual decisions, and how they may relate to subjective experience in both humans and artificial systems. She uses human neuroimaging (fMRI, EEG), computational modeling, machine learning, and psychophysics to study these questions. She is also co-founder and President of Neuromatch, which develops globally accessible education programs in computational neuroscience and related fields.

RÉFÉRENCES:

Peters & Azimi Asrari (2025). How brains build higher order representations of uncertainty. arXiv.

Peters (2025). Introspective psychophysics for the study of subjective experience. Cerebral Cortex.

Peters (2022). Towards characterizing the canonical computations generating phenomenal experience. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews.

Peters & Lau (2015). Human observers have optimal introspective access to perceptual processes even for visually masked stimuli. eLife.