Mark E. Walton

This study shows mice shift from model-free to structure-informed reinforcement learning strategies during early training in a dynamic decision-making task.

This study identifies two distinct neural representations in mouse medial frontal cortex during flexible navigation, showing how they encode position and goal distance to guide behavior.

This study shows gabapentinoids enhance dopamine release in a Parkinson's mouse model and improve movement deficits by modulating calcium and GABAergic signaling.

The paper tests whether goldfish prefer informative over non-informative choices in a reinforcement learning task, finding they do not, unlike mammals and birds.

The paper identifies a neuronal mechanism in mice that maps abstract behavioural structure, enabling zero-shot learning of new tasks through goal-progress cells in the medial frontal cortex.

The paper investigates how reward, effort, and choice are encoded hierarchically across the cortex and basal ganglia during cost-benefit decisions in rats.

The paper proposes a temporal difference model that explains how dopamine neurons encode different reward dimensions and adapts behavior based on physiological needs.

This study investigates strategic exploration in macaques, showing distinct neural circuits in ACC/MCC-dlPFC and OFC that support strategic decision-making and counterfactual learning.

This study shows that GluA1 dysfunction leads to impaired short-term habituation, resulting in a hyper-dopaminergic phenotype in the nucleus accumbens, which may contribute to aberrant salience in schizophrenia.

This study investigates the role of D1 receptors in the nucleus accumbens core in regulating reward-seeking behavior during Go/No-Go tasks in rats.

The paper introduces an extension to temporal difference learning that enables instantaneous adaptation to changing reward functions without retraining.

pyControl provides open-source hardware and software for designing and running complex behavioural experiments with improved reproducibility and scalability.

This study examines how 5-HT2C receptor perturbation affects instrumental vigour and restraint in rats, finding that systemic activation boosts performance and reduces restraint, while dopamine enhances restraint and action initiation.

This study investigates how dopamine clearance mechanisms, DAT and COMT, affect behavioral flexibility in mice using pharmacological modulation and behavioral tasks.

The paper shows that dopamine-independent state inference and dopamine-mediated reinforcement learning interact to guide reward-based decisions in mice.

The paper shows that prefrontal cortex abstracts problem structure while hippocampus maps it to specific situations in mice during reversal learning.

This study identifies distinct anatomical projection patterns into different subregions of the rat OFC along both anterior-posterior and medial-lateral axes.

The paper identifies a distributed frontal cortical circuit associated with behavioral flexibility in macaques through structural and functional imaging analyses of discrimination reversal learning.

This study compares noradrenergic and dopaminergic neuron activity in monkeys during task performance, finding that noradrenergic neurons predict re-engagement after failure and respond to task state changes.

This study shows amphetamine disrupts prediction error signals in nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal cortex in rats during learning tasks.

pyPhotometry provides open-source hardware and software for fiber photometry data acquisition, offering better signal-to-noise ratio and lower cost than commercial alternatives.

This study investigates the role of noradrenaline in behavioural flexibility and motivation using a cost/benefit decision task and clonidine manipulation, finding distinct effects on choice volatility and force production.