Vincent Valton

Name: Dr. Vincent VALTON,
                B.Sc, M.Sc, M.Res, Ph.D.

Activity: Postdoctoral Researcher
in Computational Neuropsychiatry

Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL

Research Interests:

Computational Psychiatry
Reinforcement Learning
Decision Making

University:

University College London

External Links

1. •UCL ICN group homepage
   

2. •Vincent Valton ICN
   

3. •UCL IRIS profile
   

1. •Linked-in
   

2. •ResearchGate
   

3. •Twitter
   
   
   

4. •ANC DTC homepage
   

5. •Vincent Valton DTC homepage
   

6. •Peggy Series, Ph.D. Supervisor
   

7. •Stephen Lawrie, Ph.D.  Supervisor
   

I’m a Postdoctoral researcher at UCL* working in computational neuropsychiatry with Dr. Jonathan P. Roiser at the ICN (Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL), and collaborating with Prof. Peter Dayan (Gatsby Unit, UCL). I work primarily on a project aiming at elucidating reward and punishment processing anomalies in Depression.



My research interests are in reinforcement learning, decision making in psychiatric disorders and computational models of psycho-pathologies in general. I use computational methods such as Reinforcement-Learning or Bayesian Inference models to assay various hypotheses of cognitive processes that may go awry in mental illness (e.g. learning and/or decision-making).

Ultimately, the goals of my current research project are to identify the neurobiological and computational processes that may differ in Depression to that of healthy subjects. These, may one day lead to a better understanding of the continuum and/or sub-categories observed in Depression and result in better “personalised care” for patients.

My Ph.D. (“Impaired Reinforcement-learning and Bayesian inference in psychiatric disorders: from maladaptive decision-making to psychosis in Schizophrenia”) was supervised by Dr. Peggy Series (Theoretical Research) and Prof. Stephen Lawrie (Clinical Research) at the Computational Neuroscience Doctoral Training Centre (DTC), where I was a member of the Institute for Adaptive and Neural Computation in the School of informatics of the University of Edinburgh**.

M. Rivalan*, V. Valton*, P. Seriès, A. Marchand, F. Dellu-Hagedorn (2013) “Elucidating poor decision making in a rat gambling task.” PLoS ONE 8(12): e82052. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0082052

*authors contributed equally to this work

M. Dauvermann, H.C. Whalley, L. Romaniuk, V. Valton, D.G. Owens, E.C. Johnstone, S.M. Lawrie, T.W. Moorhead (2013) “The application of non-linear Dynamic Causal Modelling for fMRI in subjects at high genetic risk of schizophrenia” Neuroimage 73:16-29. doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2013.01.063

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*UCL has been rated first in the Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014) for its quality of research power and research impact in the UK. UCL is rated 5th worldwide in University Rankings (ex aequo with Oxford).

**The University of Edinburgh is highly recognised in the field of Computer Science (Frequently ranking top 5 in the UK among Oxford and Cambridge), 17th Worldwide, and receiving the highest 5* rating during the latest Research Assessment Exercise (RAE 2008) in informatics.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Past