I’m Valentin, a computational neuroscientist and psychologist modeling latent processes 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 focuses on judgment and decision-making, information processing, social learning, and beliefs under uncertainty. I study these processes across behavioral, computational, and neural levels. I use experiments to characterize behavior, generative models to infer latent cognitive dynamics, and neuroimaging to examine how the corresponding variables and computations are represented and integrated in the brain.
One axis of my work concerns information-related decision-making: how uncertain information is evaluated, transformed into beliefs, and used to guide action. I study how uncertainty and confidence shape information seeking and avoidance, how people decide what information to communicate or withhold, and how they infer others’ preferences for information. I model the latent beliefs and inferences underlying these decisions, and investigate how these computational variables and inferences are represented across brain systems. This includes how first-order estimates about the world are combined with higher-order inferences about other people to guide behavior. I am also extending these questions to more complex decision environments, including large-scale social environments and AI-mediated environments.
A second axis concerns heterogeneity in cognition, particularly in social learning. People can reach the same choices in a given situation through different combinations of learning, inference, and belief. These differences may reflect distinct cognitive profiles that population averages obfuscate. I use computational models and neural data to identify this latent heterogeneity and to ask whether apparently similar behavior is supported by different computational and neural mechanisms. I am particularly interested in how this variation relates to cognitive and psychiatric constraints, including neurodevelopmental differences such as ASD and dimensions of psychopathology such as anxiety. I am developing computational phenotypes that capture this variation, with the longer-term goal of contributing to precision psychiatry. I am also developing methods for task design and parameter estimation that can recover these processes reliably across tasks and sessions.
On Substack, I write about cognition, AI, and epistemology - for instance, why cognition matters more than intelligence for comparing biological and artificial systems, and how AI systems create decision environments that reshape human evaluation and reasoning. 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.