Ralph Hoffman Email & Phone Number

My primary objective is to ascertain brain mechanisms that produce psychosis in schizophrenia and to develop better treatments. One line of research has been clinical trials using low frequency transcranial magnetic stimulation targeting bitemporal cortex as an experimental intervention, with promising results. A second line of research examines functional connectivity abnormalities in schizophrenia that lead to the main positive symptoms of this disorder. This study using fMRI methods.A third line of research attempts to determine neurocircuitry components ordinarily underlying speech and language that generate hallucinations of spoken speech in patients with schizophrenia. This study utilizes fMRI assessments when subjects respond to different types of real and nonsense speech, as well as during generation of inner speech. A fourth line of research line of research compares patterns of cortical/subcortical activation associated with consolidation of narrative memories in patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls. Our prediction, based on recent computational models of narrative language processing developed by our group, is that the patient group will accelerate shifts the locus of narrative representations from hippocampal to cortical structures more rapidly than healthy controls.

Listed skills include Animal Models, Research, Neuroscience, Fmri, and 46 others.