Caroline Charpentier

Caroline Charpentier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and affiliated with the Brain and Behavior Institute at the University of Maryland. She holds a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from University College London (2016) and completed postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology, focusing on social learning and decision-making mechanisms. Her interdisciplinary research integrates social neuroscience, behavioral economics, and computational psychiatry to study the neurocomputational basis of social learning, psychiatric symptom dimensions, and autism spectrum traits.

Her current work investigates how computational models can characterize social learning deficits in clinical populations (e.g., social anxiety, autism) and developmental stages. Funded by the Wellcome Trust and NIMH, her research explores biased cognitive processes, including information-seeking behaviors and belief formation, with implications for societal issues like conspiratorial thinking. The Charpentier Lab (https://sldlab.umd.edu/) develops naturalistic paradigms and integrated computational models to study human social interactions.

Dr. Charpentier has received the Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship and NIMH K99/R00 award. Her recent work highlights computational markers of uncertainty aversion linked to anxiety and pandemic responses, as well as heterogeneity in reinforcement learning mechanisms. She actively addresses methodological challenges in neuroimaging research and advocates for postdocs during crises like the pandemic and visa challenges.