Valentin Guigon

I am a postdoctoral researcher in Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Maryland, working in Caroline Charpentier’s Social Learning and Decisions Lab (SLD Lab). I am also an affiliated member of the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute at Maryland (AIM), an affiliate researcher of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) program, and an elected Full Member of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Honor Society.

My research sits at the intersection of computational neuroscience, behavioral economics, and NeuroAI. I combine behavioral experimentation, computational modeling, and neuroimaging to study how people learn, update beliefs, calibrate confidence, and make decisions under uncertainty, especially in social environments. My current work focuses on trust and social learning in dynamic settings, with an emphasis on model-based approaches, fMRI, and the formal characterization of individual differences.

More broadly, I am interested in how people assess uncertainty, seek information, and form or revise beliefs, and in how these capacities connect to the norms and institutions that structure social life. I am also increasingly drawn to foundational questions about cognition and to the relationship between neuroscience, cognitive theory, and AI.

I currently supervise a computational psychiatry project on trust and a model-based fMRI study on social learning, both focused on dynamic and uncertain social environments.

I was trained in psychology and neuroscience at Aix-Marseille Université and completed a Master’s degree in Cognitive Science at Université Lumière Lyon 2. I earned my Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience at Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, under the supervision of Jean-Claude Dreher and Marie Claire Villeval. My doctoral research focused on the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the transmission of uncertain information in social contexts.

I write about cognition, AI, and epistemology on Substack. Outside of research, I boulder, and I spend a great deal of time thinking about the works of Walt Whitman, Gregory Crewdson, Saul Leiter, and Bi Gan, and about The Birth of Tragedy.