Education

• Ph.D Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, 2010
• MSc (Distinction), Neurosciences, University of Oxford, 2006
• B.A. (Honors), Psychology, Stanford, 2004

About

Erie D. Boorman is an Associate Professor of Psychology and a core member of the Center for Mind and Brain, at the University of California, Davis. He received his Ph.D. from Oxford University working with Matthew Rushworth in Experimental Psychology, before taking up a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship between the California Institute of Technology and Oxford University, and another postdoctoral position working with Tim Behrens at the FMRIB Centre at Oxford and Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging at UCL. His research investigates the computational and neural architecture of learning and decision-making.

Dr. Boorman is a member of professional organizations, including the Society for Neuroscience, the Society for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Society for Neuroeconomics.

Dr. Boorman is the Principle Investigator of the Learning and Decision Making (LDM) Lab in the Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis.

Research Focus

How do we make decisions? How do we learn from their outcomes? Professor Boorman seeks mechanistic answers to such questions at the behavioral, computational, and neural systems levels. His research is multi-disciplinary, lying at the intersection between psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and behavioral economics. His lab investigates how the adult human brain forms and tunes predictive models of the environment, and how it leverages these models to make decisions. The prediction problems he investigates span reward prediction (e.g. money, foods, etc.), social prediction (e.g. other people’s intentions, traits, etc.), and “state” prediction (e.g. perceptually signaled and inferred latent contexts).

Current research topics include causal learning, structure learning, domain generality of prediction and selection systems, and behavioral adaptation.

For more information on the research we do, see our lab website.

Lab

Learning and Decision Making Lab (Boorman)

Publications

• Witkowski, P.P., Park, S.A., Boorman, E.D. (2022). Neural mechanisms of credit assignment for inferred relationships in a structured world. Neuron, 110(16): 2680-2690.
• 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.
• Park, S. A., Miller, D.S., Nili, H., Ranganath, C., Boorman, E.D. (2020) Map Making: Constructing, Combining, and Inferring on Abstract Cognitive Maps. Neuron, 107: 1–13.
• Boorman, E.D., Sweigart, S.C., Park, S.A. (2021). Cognitive maps and novel inferences: a flexibility hierarchy. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 38, 141-149.

Teaching

Erie Boorman has taught Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience in Psychology and Decision Neuroscience/Neuroeconomics, cross-listed between Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Economics

Awards

• NSF CAREER Award, UC Davis, 2019-present
• Wellcome Trust, Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2010-14
• Wellcome Trust Prize Studentship, University of Oxford, 2005-10
• Overseas Research Student Award, University of Oxford, 2006-09
• Computational and Systems Neuroscience Travel Award, 2014
• Human Brain Mapping Travel Award, 2007-10
• Summer Research College Award, Stanford University, 2003