Season 2, Episode 1: A Framework For Building Better Research Questions with Dr. Megan Peters
In our first episode for Season Two, we're excited to be joined by Dr. Megan Peters, Associate Professor of Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine and Fellow in the CIFAR Brain, Mind & Consciousness program. Dr. Peters leads the Cognitive and Neurocomputation Lab, where her work bridges neuroscience, psychology, computational modelling, AI, and philosophy.
We start this great conversation with Dr. Peters by discussing her August 2025 paper, “How to Develop Good Research Questions.” which was published by Nature Human Behaviour.
While research questions were introduced in season one, this episode goes deeper—unpacking how to transform an initial idea into a clear, testable, and meaningful research question. Dr. Peters outlines a practical four-step framework, highlights common pitfalls, and shows how emerging tools—including AI—can support the refinement of strong scientific questions.
This conversation explores how scholars across disciplines can move from curiosity to rigour, using structured thinking to design exciting and impactful research projects. Whether you’re designing your first study, mentoring graduate students, or revisiting the fundamentals of your own research practice, this episode offers a powerful framework to guide your scientific journey.
Stay curious, we're glad to welcome you to season two.
Papers & Resources That We Touched On In This Episode:
- How To Develop and Refine A Research Question
- Dr Peters Website
- Neuromatch: Facilitating Global Collaboration in Computational Sciences
- What is Meta Cognition?
- CIFAR: The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research
- The Brain Mind and Consciousness Cluster at CIFAR
- Dr Daniel Dennett: American Philosopher and Cognitive Scientist
- Dr Dennett's Memoir: I've Been Thinking
A Couple of Great Organizational & Review Tools Recommended By Dr. Peters
Guests
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Dr. Megan Peters
Dr. Megan Peters is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine and a part-time Lecturer in Experimental Psychology at University College London, where her research group will relocate in spring/summer 2026. She is also a faculty member with the UCI Department of Logic & Philosophy of Science, a Fellow in the UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, the UCI Center for Theoretical Behavioral Sciences, and a Fellow in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research Brain Mind & Consciousness Program, or CIFAR.
Drawing on cognitive science, psychology, computational neuroscience, and philosophy, Dr. Peters studies how brains process, evaluate, and learn from sensory information. Her research focuses on adaptive behaviour under uncertainty—asking how noisy and ambiguous information is represented in neural activity, how the brain evaluates its own confidence and errors, and how expectations are learned and updated through experience. She also explores how these computational and neural processes relate to subjective experience and consciousness, and what human and animal cognition can teach us about building artificial systems.
Dr. Peters is an elected member of the Board of Directors of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness and serves as an advisor to several corporations and nonprofits. She is also the President, Co-founder, and Chair of the Board of Directors at Neuromatch, a global nonprofit dedicated to accessible, collaborative science education, which has served over 40,000 participants across 130+ countries.