Welcome to the Bolkan Lab in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the Iowa Neuroscience Institute at The University of Iowa!

We want to understand how the brain evaluates sensory information, stores this information in memory, and uses this information to make decisions that guide actions. Intuition and evidence tell us this complicated process does not rely on any single brain area, but is instead the product of activity in networks of neurons distributed across the brain.

By measuring, manipulating, and modeling large-scale neural dynamics while mice perform well-controlled decision-making tasks in virtual reality, our goal is to map different decision-making computations onto activity in distinct neural circuits. In tandem, we seek to leverage the principles of neural circuit function that our work reveals toward an understanding of how cognition and decision-making is disrupted in human disorders, such as schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease.