I’m Valentin, a computational neuroscientist and psychologist modeling latent dynamics of brain and behavior.
I work with Caroline Charpentier in the Social Learning and Decisions Lab (SLD Lab) at the University of Maryland. 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, an elected Full Member of Sigma Xi, the Scientific Research Honor Society, a Fellow at Thinking about Thinking, and a founding member and Cohort 001 expert at DisCo. My doctoral thesis was supervised by Jean-Claude Dreher and Marie Claire Villeval.
My research asks how people process information, learn from social experience, and revise beliefs in dynamic environments. I combine behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and neuroimaging to study these processes at both behavioral and neural levels. I build generative models to infer hidden cognitive and brain states from noisy observations, linking neural dynamics to cognition and behavioral strategies. My current work focuses on information-related decision-making, and on characterizing heterogeneity in neurotypical and neuroatypical trust learning and social decision-making, with applications to computational psychiatry.
More broadly, I am interested in the computational principles that link cognition, social behavior, and artificial intelligence, and in how uncertainty, belief, and epistemic norms shape human decision-making. I also write about cognition, AI, and epistemology on Substack. Outside of research, I boulder, I do photography, and I spend a great deal of time thinking about the works of Walt Whitman, Saul Leiter, and The Birth of Tragedy.