Julia Sheffield, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences; Jack Martin, M.D., Research Professor in Psychopharmacology
VKC Member
Overview of Interests
Dr. Sheffield's research focuses on cognition and cognitive difficulties. Primarily, this research occurs in the context of psychotic disorders (e.g. schizophrenia) and adolescents at high risk for developing a psychotic disorder (i.e. clinical high risk or psychosis-spectrum youth). She uses behavioral studies, fMRI, and computational psychiatry to understand thinking and learning. In the past, she studied generalized cognitive deficit in psychotic disorders and resting-state networks in these populations. More recently, her research has begun to focus on psychotic symptoms, still through a cognitive neuroscience lens. In this context she studies belief updating (i.e. learning about our environment and making decisions), within the framework of predictive coding.She is starting to focus more on the body, through work on interoception (in collaboration with VKC members Carissa Cascio and Sohee Park) and aberrant perceptual experiences.