Mark Walton

Research Summary

I am Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience at the Department of Experimental Psychology and also serve as the current British Neuroscience Association Trustee for Preclinical Neuroscience.  My laboratory, established in 2010, investigates the neural mechanisms underpinning motivation and adaptive decision making, with a particular focus on how neurochemicals such as dopamine regulate these processes on a moment-by-moment timescale in rodents. 

My lab employs a multidisciplinary approach with a strong emphasis on behaviour, drawing inspiration from behavioural ecology, animal learning theory, neuroeconomics, and psychology, to unravel complex brain-behaviour relationships.  We are known for pioneering the use of cutting-edge methods for recording and manipulating dopamine release in rodents during novel decision making paradigms.  This work is helping to show how dopamine, in tandem with wider cortical-basal ganglia circuits, regulates when to act, when to persist, and when to switch to something new.

The long-term goal is to use the information gleaned about the functional of these systems to better understand how the process of valuation and decision making goes awry in neuropsychiatric disorders.

The laboratory uses a range of recording and interference techniques to address these questions, including fibre photometry, electrochemistry, optogenetics, neuropharmacological manipulations, and genetic manipulations.  We are particularly interested to use combinations of techniques in order to investigate communication between brain regions and the causal interactions within these networks.