Embedded Files
Welcome to the Social Learning and Decisions lab website! The lab is located in the Department of Psychology at the University or Maryland, College Park.
Research in the lab focuses on uncovering the behavioral and neural computations involved in human social and affective influences on learning and decision-making processes, with a strong interest in how individual variability in these processes and their underlying computations relate to psychopathology.
Lab drinks and pizza at Streetcar 82 Brewing Co
Lab drinks and pizza at Streetcar 82 Brewing Co
August 2024
Lab news!
April 2025 - Yukta, Chaebin and Caroline attended SANS (Social Affective Neuroscience Society) conference in Chicago. Yukta and Chaebin presented their respective first-year projects:
Chaebin' poster: "Predicting Internalizing Symptoms in Early Adolescence from Computational Cognitive Profiles of Risk, Reward, and Social Processing"
Yukta's poster: "Cognitive Mechanisms of Feedback-seeking along Internalizing Symptoms"
December 2024 & March 2025 - The lab was awarded two seed grants to pilot combining naturalistic studies of social interaction with computational approaches:
BBI seed grant: "Computational Social Neuroscience in the Wild" (in collaboration with Elizabeth Redcay, Rachel Romeo & Philip Resnik)
BSOS Dean's Research Initiative: "Mechanisms of trust during naturalistic social interaction"
Sean also received the Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship, which will fully fund his Spring 2026 semester - Congrats!
August 2024:
The lab welcomes two new graduate students in the NACS program and expends its worldwide coverage! Yukta Thyagaraj is joining us from India and Chaebin Yoo from South Korea.
We also said goodbye to Selin Topel who visited the lab this summer from Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Finally, Sean passed his comprehensive exam and advanced to candidacy!
July 16-18, 2024 - The lab attended the 2nd edition of the Computational Psychiatry Conference, held in Minneapolis. We had 3 poster presentations:
Xiaodi (Sara) Hu presented "Characterizing heterogeneity in social influence on decisions under risk and ambiguity"
Sean Maulhardt presented "Information Uncertainty Influences Learning Strategy from Sequentially Delayed Rewards"
Selin Topel presented "Information sampling decisions differentially relate to prospective and inhibitory intolerance of uncertainty"
March 2024 - The lab welcomed its first postdoctoral scholar, Dr. Valentin Guigon, who is joining us from France after completing his PhD at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences in Lyon.
December 2023 - Congratulations to Sean who was awarded the Outstanding Graduate Assistant award for the year 2023-2024! This award from the UMD graduate school recognizes awardees as among the top 2% of campus Graduate Assistants in a given year and covers mandatory fees for the Spring semester.
Page updated
Report abuse