Vincent Valton

• B.Sc. (Hons), M.Sc., M.Res, Ph.D.
• Fellow at University College London

Background Atypical reward processing is implicated in a range of psychiatric disorders associated with childhood maltreatment and may represent a latent vulnerability mechanism. In this longitudinal study, we investigated the impact of maltreatment on behavioural and neural indices of reward learning in volatile environments and examined associati...

Background: Atypical reward processing is implicated in a range of psychiatric disorders associated with childhood maltreatment and may represent a latent vulnerability mechanism. In this longitudinal study, we investigated the impact of maltreatment on behavioural and neural indices of reward learning in volatile environments and examined associat...

Background Motivational dysfunction is a core feature of depression, and can have debilitating effects on everyday function. However, it is unclear which disrupted cognitive processes underlie impaired motivation, and whether impairments persist following remission. Decision-making concerning exerting effort to collect rewards offers a promising fr...

Cambridge Textbook of Neuroscience for Psychiatrists is a 'one stop shop' for what any psychiatrist needs to know about the brain. Understanding the brain and mind requires a vast array of techniques and conceptual approaches. The Editors have assembled a team of basic neuroscientists, geneticists, psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, neuros...

Computational models can offer mechanistic insight into cognition and therefore have the potential to transform our understanding of psychiatric disorders and their treatment. For translational efforts to be successful, it is imperative that computational measures capture individual characteristics reliably. To date, this issue has received little...

Background: Cannabis use may be linked with anhedonia and apathy. However, previous studies have shown mixed results and few have examined the association between cannabis use and specific reward sub-processes. Adolescents may be more vulnerable to harmful effects of cannabis than adults. This study investigated (1) the association between non-acu...

In order to develop effective treatments for anhedonia we need to understand its underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Anhedonia is conceptually strongly linked to reward processing, which involves a variety of cognitive and neural operations. This chapter reviews the evidence for impairments in experiencing hedonic response (pleasure), reward val...

In this longitudinal study of children and adolescents with a documented history of maltreatment, we investigated the impact of maltreatment on behavioral and neural indices of effort-based decision making for reward and examined their associations with future internalizing symptoms. Thirty-seven children with a documented history of maltreatment (...

In order to develop effective treatments for anhedonia we need to understand its underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Anhedonia is conceptually strongly linked to reward processing, which involves a variety of cognitive and neural operations. This article reviews the evidence for impairments in experiencing hedonic response (pleasure), reward val...

Background: Computational models can offer mechanistic insight into cognition and therefore have the potential to transform our understanding of psychiatric disorders and their treatment. For translational efforts to be successful, it is imperative that computational measures capture individual characteristics reliably. To date, this issue has rece...

Background. Depression has been associated with alterations in decision making and reinforcement learning, as well as with biases in metacognition, such as low confidence. However, interactions between these aspects of cognition remain under-investigated. Research in healthy participants has shown that difficulties during decision making can reduce...

Over the past three decades, functional MRI (fMRI) has become key to study how cognitive processes are implemented in the human brain. However, the question of whether participants recruited into fMRI studies differ from participants recruited into other study contexts has received little to no attention. This is particularly pertinent when effects...

Hierarchical model fitting has become commonplace for case-control studies of cognition and behaviour in mental health. However, these techniques require us to formalise assumptions about the data-generating process at the group level, which may not be known. Specifically, researchers typically must choose whether to assume all subjects are drawn f...

Over the past three decades, MRI has become a key tool to study how cognitive processes are implemented in the human brain. However, the question of whether participants recruited into MRI studies differ from participants recruited into other study contexts has received little to no attention. This is particularly pertinent when effects fail to gen...

Introduction: Hierarchical model fitting has become commonplace in cognitive neuroscience. However, these techniques require us to formalise assumptions about the data-generating process at the group level, which may not be known. In computational psychiatry, we frequently encounter situations with multiple distinct groups of subjects, which makes...

Anxiety is characterized by altered responses under uncertain conditions, but the precise mechanism by which uncertainty changes the behaviour of anxious individuals is unclear. Here we probe the computational basis of learning under uncertainty in healthy individuals and individuals suffering from a mix of mood and anxiety disorders. Participants...

Background Depression is common among people with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), though the causes remain unclear. We conducted a cross‐sectional study to investigate the role of emotional processing biases in contributing to depression among people with IBD. Materials and Methods One hundred and twenty outpatients with IBD were recruited and:...

Prominent theories suggest that symptoms of schizophrenia stem from learning deficiencies resulting in distorted internal models of the world. To test these theories further, we used a visual statistical learning task known to induce rapid implicit learning of the stimulus statistics. In this task, participants are presented with a field of coheren...

Prominent theories suggest that symptoms of schizophrenia stem from learning deficiencies resulting in distorted internal models of the world. To further test these theories, we here use a visual statistical learning task known to induce rapid implicit learning of the stimulus statistics (Chalk et al., 2010). In this task, participants are presente...

Evidence for endemically low statistical power has recently cast neuroscience findings into doubt. If low statistical power plagues neuroscience, this reduces confidence in reported effects. However, if statistical power is not uniformly low, such blanket mistrust might not be warranted. Here, we provide a different perspective on this issue, analy...

Studying the effects of experimentally induced anxiety in healthy volunteers may increase our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning anxiety disorders. Experimentally induced stress (via threat of unpredictable shock) improves accuracy at withholding a response on the sustained attention to response task (SART), and in separate studies improv...

The lateral habenula plays a central role in reward and punishment processing and has been suggested to drive the cardinal symptom of anhedonia in depression. This hypothesis is largely based on observations of habenula hypermetabolism in animal models of depression, but the activity of habenula and its relationship with clinical symptoms in patien...

Unlabelled: Why are some people strongly motivated by intense sensory experiences? Here we investigated how people encode the value of an intense sensory experience compared with economic reward, and how this varies according to stimulation-seeking preference. Specifically, we used a novel behavioral task in combination with computational modeling...

Why are some people strongly motivated by intense sensory experiences? Here we investigated how people encode the value of an intense sensory experience compared with economic reward, and how this varies according to stimulation-seeking preference. Specifically, we used a novel behavioral task in combination with computational modeling to derive th...

Significance Prosocial behaviors are essential for social bonding and cohesion, but the mechanisms that underpin these behaviors are still poorly understood. Using computational modeling and neuroimaging, we show that people can learn to benefit others and that this learning is underpinned by reinforcement learning signals in the subgenual anterior...

Studying the effects of experimentally induced anxiety in healthy volunteers may increase our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning anxiety disorders. Prior work has shown that experimentally induced anxiety (via threat of unpredictable shock) improves accuracy at withholding a response on the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART), and...

Studying the effects of experimentally induced anxiety in healthy volunteers may increase our understanding of the mechanisms underpinning anxiety disorders. Prior work has shown that experimentally induced anxiety (via threat of unpredictable shock) improves accuracy at withholding a response on the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART), and...

Computational modelling has been gaining an increasing amount of support from the neuroscience community as a tool to assay cognition and computational processes in the brain. Lately, scientists have started to apply computational methods from neuroscience to the study of psychiatry to gain further insight into the mechanisms leading to mental diso...

Although poor decision-making is a hallmark of psychiatric conditions such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, pathological gambling or substance abuse, a fraction of healthy individuals exhibit similar poor decision-making performances in everyday life and specific laboratory tasks such as the Iowa Gambling Task. These particular individu...

RGT is modeled as a Markov decision process and we extended the classical TD-learning algorithm by incorporating risk seeking [4], reward sensitivity and cognitive inflexibility. These behavioral traits were implemented independently and influence either the learning rate or the perception of rewards by the agent. The parameters of the model were e...