From: Cognitive Science Association
Date: December 15, 2020
Subject: PROFESSOR SPOTLIGHT - Professor Peters



SPOTLIGHT - PROFESSOR PETERS

This week's spotlight was with Professor Peters. She is a professor in the school of Cognitive Science and teaches courses Psych 169 - Metacognition (bi-yearly) and Psych 9A/PSCI 11A - Psych Fundamentals. Her current research is on perception, conciousness, and metacognition.

Here's what she said!

What research lab do you work in?

Professor Peters runs the Cognitive & Neural Computation Lab. If you are interested on current projects happening in her lab, you can watch a video of her and her graduate students describing their projects on their lab website!

Is there a project that you ran or oversaw that you are particularly proud of?

A topic she was recently researching was inducing blindsight behavior, a phenomenon where one loses conscious vision while still unconsciously being able to react to environmental stimuli.

The first results were surprising, and they thought there were bugs in the model they were building. But after checking and finding no bugs, they realized the behavior everybody thought they would be inducing was not actually blindsight, and they needed to develop a different set of methods to research this topic!

This discovery, which was published into a high-ranking journal, demonstrated that evidence against your hypothesis and null results are still extremely valuable to the scientific community!

What advice would you give a student who wants to pursue research in this field, or join your lab?

To join her lab, she suggests visiting her Lab page and familiarizing yourself with the current projects. Then, send her an email with your CV, which projects you are interested in working on and sell yourself!

You need to know basic programming skills (for loops, if statements, and data matrices manipulation) OR at least be willing to learn. Knowing how to code is the only way that you will be able to advance in the lab, and eventually make your own study. It would also be helpful to be familiar with basic calculus and statistics so that you can analyze data. 

"The point of research is to answer a question no one else has answered before. If nobody has answered it before, nobody wrote the software button to answer it; someone has to make the button."  

What kinds of industry jobs can you pursue with this background?

With this background, you can work in data science that involves finding the patterns in large data sets (i.e. climate, economics, biological sciences, etc.). 

You can also work in Human Factors and User Interface Design. For virtual reality devices, this also involves tricking our brain into perceiving virtual environment as real. Companies such Oculus, Facebook Virtual Reality Labs, and Microsoft recruit these consultants.

Another line of work could be seeing how sensation and perception are affected under great amounts of pressure (literally, like gravity), and how to account for those differences. This type of research can get you hired by Nasa!

What advice would you give to a student who wants to get in touch?

Whether you have had a class with Professor Peters or not, please email her with any questions you may have! If she does not respond right away, please check back in. Inboxes these days are busier than usual! 

HER ADVICE FOR YOU:
Don't assume the easy path is going to work. You have to be willing to fail AND solve problems independently.

Professor Peters completed her PhD in computational cognitive neuroscience (psychology) at UCLA. She also completed her postdoc at UCLA!

Prior to coming to UCI in the Spring of 2020, she was a professor at UC Riverside in the Department of Bioengineering.