Valentin Guigon

Current position

I am a postdoctoral researcher in Psychology and Neuroscience 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) and an affiliate researcher of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) program.

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.

About me

My research combines behavioral experimentation, computational modeling, and neuroimaging to study how people learn, update beliefs, and make decisions under uncertainty - especially in social contexts. I’m broadly interested in how people assess uncertainty, calibrate confidence, and seek information - and in how these individual capacities connect to the norms and institutions that structure social life. More recently, I’ve been drawn to foundational questions about the nature of cognition and the relationship between neuroscience and AI.

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 lot of time thinking about the works of Walt Whitman, Gregory Crewdson, Saul Leiter, and David Lynch, and about The birth of Tragedy.