CHBH Seminar Series: Dr Caroline Charpentier

Seeking advice and seeking feedback: cognitive mechanisms and relevance for psychopathology

Dr Caroline Charpentier

Thursday 4th June 2026 11am-12pm

In-person: Gisbert Kapp NG16

Online: Zoom - join here

We are delighted to announce the CHBH and CHBH PI Arkady Konovalov will welcome Dr Caroline Charpentier, Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, to present a hybrid CHBH Seminar on Seeking advice and seeking feedback: cognitive mechanisms and relevance for psychopathology.

CHBH Host: Dr Arkady Konovalov

Information is abundant in our hyper connected world, yet how people actively decide to seek (or avoid) information from others remains poorly understood. In this talk, I will present two studies that focus on understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying active decisions to seek advice and feedback from others, as well as how individual differences in these processes may carry relevance for psychopathology. In the first study, we characterized biased advice-seeking and integration via two parameters in a Bayesian belief-updating framework: the relative weight of prior beliefs and advice, and the relative weight of confirmatory versus accurate advice. Clustering over these parameters revealed a dissociation between social anxiety and autistic traits. In the second study, we identified two main drivers of seeking feedback from strangers on one’s performance in a perceptual task: expecting positive feedback and perceiving the feedback as useful, while other hypothesized drivers (uncertainty or confirmation, feedback directness) did not affect the decisions. The tendency to seek feedback according to its expected valence also varied depending on the levels of two dimensions of social anxiety: social fear-avoidance and reassurance-seeking. These findings provide new insights in our understanding of how people seek information in social contexts and highlight how these cognitive mechanisms may dissociate typically co-occurring symptom dimensions related to social dysfunction

Dr Caroline Charpentier

Caroline Charpentier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology, Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science, and the Brain and Behaviour Institute at the University of Maryland. She obtained her PhD in cognitive neuroscience at University College London, UK, with her dissertation focusing on the interaction between emotions and decision-making. She then completed her postdoctoral training at the California Institute of Technology, studying the behavioural, neural, and computational mechanisms of social learning and decision-making. Her research is interdisciplinary, drawing from social neuroscience, behavioural economics and computational psychiatry, with current projects investigating the neuro-computational mechanisms of social learning and variation along psychiatric symptom dimensions. Dr Charpentier’s research has received funding from the Wellcome Trust, National Institute of Mental Health, and the Sloan Foundation.