Valerii Chirkov
Photo: SCIoI
Valerii Chirkov is a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist with an interest in social behavior, behavioral experimentation, and human behavior in online and virtual-reality environments.
He joined SCIoI as a doctoral researcher in June 2023.
Valerii initially studied Clinical Psychology and then pursued a Master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience. Prior to joining SCIoI, he worked as a research assistant at the Social Intelligence Lab at Humboldt University of Berlin and later at the Center for Humans & Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. There, he focused on developing behavioral experiments, both online and in virtual reality.
At SCIoI, Valerii is working on the synthetic aspect of Project 51, Navigating the Explore-Exploit Trade-off in Collective Search. In this project, he investigates how two collectives with differing goals engage in collective search and avoidance strategies.
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Chirkov, V., Kurvers, R. H. J. M., Deffner, D., & Romanczuk, P. (2026). Social information quality and environmental volatility shape collective foraging behaviour. Royal Society Open Science, 13(9), 260606. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.260606
Lee, Liang, Chirkov, V., Tian, Shen, Wu, Charley M, & Witt, Alexandra. (2026). Trust Issues: Social Learning Under Misaligned Goals. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 48. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1g4687h7
