Pamela D. Butler, Ph.D.

Dr. Pamela Butler received her PhD in psychology from the City University of New York and did post-doctoral fellowships at Duke University in Neuropsychopharmacology and at Columbia University in Schizophrenia Research. At Columbia, she began perceptual studies of schizophrenia focusing on aberrant visual pathway function and its effects on more global perception and speed of processing. She continued this work at the Manhattan Veterans Administration Medical Center and joined the Psychiatry faculty at New York University Grossman School of Medicine, and then moved to the Nathan Kline Institute.

At NKI, Dr. Butler has studied visual perceptual difficulties in schizophrenia and their effects on cognition and social function. She has received grant funding from the National Institute of Mental Health to develop biomarkers of perceptual function, to develop methods to assess perceptual function. She also received an award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation to study the effect of difficulties in perception on face emotion processing. More recently, based on studies of perceptual deficits in schizophrenia, Dr. Butler and colleagues have developed visual perceptual remediations using adaptive games on iPads. She is Co-Principal Investigator of a multi-site study looking at the effects of these visual remediations on markers of visual (gain control and visual integration) and cognitive function in people with schizophrenia. Her lab is also studying social reward processing in schizophrenia and its relationship to face emotion recognition and clinical functioning.

She serves on National Institutes of Health grant Study Sections and co-chaired an NIH-sponsored panel for the Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research in Schizophrenia project to determine perceptual tasks for use in clinical trials. Dr. Butler is also on the executive committee of World Women in Neuroscience and is the editor of their newsletter.