Megan Peters
University of California, Irvine
Functionalist What matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material
Megan Peters PhD is an associate professor of cognitive sciences at the University of California, Irvine, where she directs the Reflexion Lab. She earned her PhD in neuroscience from the University of California, Berkeley and completed postdoctoral training in computational cognitive science.
Peters studies metacognitive access the ability of a system to evaluate its own internal states and its role in conscious awareness. Her work bridges human psychophysics, computational modeling, and AI evaluation, asking whether artificial systems can exhibit metacognitive capabilities and what computational architectures are required for self-awareness.
She was a keynote speaker at Models of Consciousness 7 (MoC7) in Copenhagen, where she addressed the validity of consciousness tests and the challenge of measuring metacognitive access in non-biological systems.
Known for. Metacognitive access in AI, consciousness test validity, computational requirements for self-awareness
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Megan Peters is listed with the other functionalists and computationalists, who hold that what matters is the organisation of the processing, not the material. The theory family behind that position is set out in the index of consciousness theories. Every researcher covered on this site is indexed in the directory of consciousness researchers.