Erie Boorman

Associate Professor
Primary Area: Behavioral Neuroscience
Email: erie@ucla.edu

Research and Teaching Interests:

How do we make new decisions? How do we best learn from their outcomes? In many real-world situations, behavior takes place in situations not encountered before, requiring novel behaviors that cannot easily rely on previously learned values (e.g. choosing a new friend or a restaurant in a new city). In such situations, evidence suggests we abstract generalizable building blocks to compose sensible predictions that both inform our choices and new learning. In the Learning and Decision Making Lab, we use combinations of computational, behavioral, neuroimaging, neurophysiological, and neurostimulation techniques to investigate how the brain abstracts, updates, and uses internal models to make such inferential decisions and adaptive learning.

One current focus in the lab is how people abstract “cognitive maps” of relationships between locations, items, entities, and events (e.g. a spatial map, task schema, social network, hierarchical plan, etc.) to make sound inferences, generalize to new situations, and flexibly decide. In our lab we are interested in the computational and neural mechanisms by which people form such cognitive maps, rapidly assimilate new experiences, and use these to make new decisions. Another focus is how we attribute important outcomes (e.g. an illness, or a good grade) to their most likely causes (e.g. a shellfish allergy, or studying in a group), a problem formally known as credit assignment. We investigate how the brain uses an internal model, a type of cognitive map, to assign credit wisely, with a focus on how we infer a common latent (hidden) cause (e.g. the drop in Apple and Meta shares were both caused by a tech bubble and Google is also likely to drop).

Biography:

Erie obtained his B.A. with honors in Psychology from Stanford University, before moving across the pond to do a Wellcome Trust Prize Studentship in Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, reading for his M.Sc. in Neuroscience and Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology under the guidance of Matthew Rushworth and David Bannerman. From 2010-2014, he was then awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship to pursue postdoctoral research under the guidance of Antonio Rangel, John O’Doherty and Ralph Adolphs at Caltech, and Tim Behrens at Oxford and UCL, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship from 2014-2016 with Tim Behrens at Oxford and UCL. From 2016-2025 he was a faculty member at UC Davis in the Center for Mind and Brain and the Department of Psychology, before joining the Department of Psychology and Brain Research Institute at UCLA in 2025.

Representative Publications:

Orloff M.A., Boorman E.D. (in press). Off task map-making: give it a rest! Neuron.

Witkowski P.P., Rondot L., Kurth-Nelson Z., Garvert M.M., Dolan R.J., Behrens T.E., Boorman E.D. (2025). Neural mechanisms of credit assignment for delayed outcomes during contingent learning. eLife: 13:RP101841.

Orloff M.A., Boorman E.D. (2024). Cognitive Maps: Constructing a Route with Your Snout. Current Biology: 33(18): R963-R965.

Ianni A., Eisenberg D., Boorman E.D., Constantino S., Hegarty C., Gregory M., Masdeu J., Kohn P., Behrens T.E., and Berman K. (2024). PET-measured human dopamine synthesis capacity and receptor availability predict trading rewards and time-costs during foraging. Nature Communications, 14(1):6122.

Crivelli-Decker J., Clarke A., Park S.A., Huffman D.J., Boorman E.D., Ranganath C.R. (2023). Goal-oriented representations in the human hippocampus during planning and navigation. Nature Communications, 14(1):2946.

Witkowski P.P., Park S.A., Boorman E.D. (2022). Neural mechanisms of credit assignment for inferred relationships in a structured world. Neuron, 110, 1-11.

Park, S.A., Miller, D.S., Boorman, E.D. (2021). Novel Inferences in a Multidimensional Social Hierarchy Use a Grid-like Code. Nature Neuroscience, 24: 1292–1301.

Mizrak E., Bouffard N.R., Libby L.A., Boorman E.D., Ranganath, C. (2021). The hippocampus and orbitofrontal cortex jointly represent task structure during memory-guided decision making. Cell Reports 37: 110065.

Boorman E.D., Witkowski P., Zhang Y., Park S.A. (2021). The orbital frontal cortex, task structure, and inference. Behavioral Neuroscience, 135: 291-300.

Boorman E.D., Sweigart, S.C., Park S.A. (2021). Cognitive maps and novel inferences: a flexibility hierarchy. Current Opinions in Behavioral Sciences, 38: 141-149.

Park, S.A., Miller D.S., Boorman, E.D. (2021). Protocol for building a cognitive map of structural knowledge in humans by integrating piecemeal learned abstract relationships from separate experiences. Star Protocols, 2.

Park S.A., Miller D.S., Nili H., Ranganath C.R., Boorman E.D. (2020). Map Making: Constructing, Combining, and Inferring on Abstract Cognitive Maps. Neuron. S0896-6273(20).

Park, S.A., Sestito, M., Boorman, E.D., Dreher, J.C. (2019). Neural computations underlying strategic social decision-making in groups. Nature Communications 10:5287.

Hill, M.R., Boorman, E.D., Fried, I. (2016). Observational learning computations in single neurons of the human anterior cingulate cortex. Nature Communications: 7:12722.

Boorman, E.D., Rajendran, V., O’Reilly, J.X., Behrens, T.E. (2016). Two computationally and anatomically distinct learning signals predict changes to stimulus-outcome associations in hippocampus. Neuron: 89:1343-54.

Boorman, E.D., O’Doherty, J.P., Adolphs, R., Rangel, A. (2013). The behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying the tracking of expertise. Neuron: 80:1558-71.

Boorman, E.D., Rushworth, M.F., Behrens, T.E. (2013). Ventromedial prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex adopt choice and default reference frames during sequential multialternative choice. Journal of Neuroscience: 33:2242-53.

Rushworth, M.F., Noonan, M.P., Boorman, E.D., Walton, M.E., Behrens, T.E. (2011). Frontal cortex and reward-guided learning and decision-making. Neuron: 70:1054:69.

Boorman, E.D., Behrens, T.E., Rushworth, M.F. (2011). Counterfactual choice and learning in a neural network centered on human lateral frontopolar cortex. PLoS Biology: 9:e1001093.

Boorman, E.D., Rushworth, M.F. (2009). Conceptual representation and the making of new decisions. Neuron, 63:721-3.

Boorman, E.D., Behrens, T.E., Woolrich, M.W., and Rushworth, M.F.S. (2009). How green is the grass on the other side? Frontopolar cortex and the representation of alternative courses of action. Neuron, 62:733-43.

Boorman, E.D., O’Shea, J., Sebastian, C., Rushworth, M.F.S., Johansen-Berg, H. (2007). Individual Differences in White-Matter Microstructure Reflect Variation in Functional Connectivity during Choice. Current Biology, 17:1426-31.