Judy Thompson
University of Rochester, NY·Neuroscience
Between 60% and 80% of people with schizophrenia hear voices or sounds that are not there, known as auditory hallucinations. These experiences are often distressing and disabling.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Psychology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
schizophrenia
psychosis
auditory hallucinations
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Test whether auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia are linked to impaired neural encoding of speech, by modeling EEG brain responses to clear and acoustically degraded speech in patients with and without hallucinations and in healthy controls.
- Determine whether prior knowledge more strongly shapes speech processing in people with hallucinations, using word predictability in narrative speech and advance information about degraded speech content.
- Examine whether, among patients with auditory hallucinations, weaker auditory encoding of speech is related to a greater influence of prior expectations on that encoding.
More about the research
Many people do not respond well to antipsychotic medication or have trouble with its side effects. Recent theories suggest hallucinations arise when the brain trusts its expectations too much and the actual sounds reaching the ears too little. Weaker basic sound processing may push the brain toward this imbalance. Testing these ideas could guide new, targeted treatments.
Why it matters
Many people with schizophrenia keep hearing distressing hallucinations despite antipsychotic treatment. Pinning down whether weak sound processing and overly strong expectations drive these symptoms could point to new treatment targets. It could also yield EEG-based biomarkers that identify which patients are most likely to benefit from a particular intervention.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Chung Yin Joseph Lau
Northwestern University, IL·Neuroscience
Test whether the balance between top-down expectation signals and local speech representations is disrupted in autism, using EEG to measure context-dependent processing of speech sounds.
Edmund Lalor
University of Rochester, NY·Neuroscience
Measure "perceptual echoes", reverberating responses in early visual cortex, with high-density EEG to isolate top-down predictive feedback in healthy volunteers and in patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
Fernando Llanos Lucas
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Neuroscience
Compare how speakers of languages with simpler versus more complex sound systems perceive key speech features, using auditory perception tasks.
The school
University of Rochester: 38 labs on PI Pages, $492M a year on research, 308 research doctorates a year.
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