The focus of this meeting will be on understanding the physiological basis, measurement and interpretive issues and practicalities of functional imaging biomarkers to enhance translational research to treat cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia and related disorders. We have an outstanding slate of speakers lined up and are planning for a highly interactive day and a half. The results of the meeting will be published in a special issue of Biological Psychiatry and will lay the groundwork for an additional meeting to be held in 2010 which will identify a set of specific imaging biomarkers for the purpose of new treatment discovery and development.

The first meeting was held in Washington, DC on February the 26th and 27th 2007. This first meeting focused on cognitive systems and component processes that should serve as targets for measure and treatment development. The meeting brought together a relatively small group (approximately 60 participants) of basic cognitive and social cognitive neuroscientists, clinical investigators of cognition in schizophrenia and animal modelers from academia and industry. Over a day and a half we identified a set of target cognitive systems and component processes that will be the focus, in two subsequent meetings, of psychometrically and pragmatically informed task translation and development. These tasks would be used either alone to measure the functioning of specific cognitive systems, or incorporated into neuroimaging studies (fMRI, EEG/ERP, etc) to measure the effects of treatment on the underlying neural circuitry. The products of this meeting laid the groundwork for the second meeting, which addressed psychometric issues related to the development of cognitive neuroscience measures for treatment development for impaired cognition in schizophrenia.

The second meeting was held on Friday, September 28, 2007 at the Eric P. Newman Education Center in St. Louis, Missouri. This meeting again brought together a small group (approximately 60 participants) of psychometricians, basic cognitive and social cognitive neuroscientists, clinical investigators of cognition in schizophrenia and animal modelers from academia and industry. This meeting had two goals. The first was educational, informing basic cognitive neuroscientists about the psychometric issues involved in using cognitive tasks in clinical trial settings, and informing psychometricians and clinical trial experts about the constraints of maintaining cognitive construct validity. The second goal was to develop a consensus among the psychometricians, cognitive scientists and clinical trialists as to what acceptable metrics are for test performance and to provide suggestions as to how tasks can be altered to meet these metrics while maintaining their construct validity.

The third meeting was held in March of 2008 in Sacramento, CA. This meeting again brought together a small group (approximately 60 participants) of basic cognitive and social cognitive neuroscientists, clinical investigators of cognition in schizophrenia and animal modelers from academia and industry. The goal of the third and final meeting was to develop a set of candidate tasks which measure the key component processes of cognitive systems identified in the first meeting. These tasks are now the focus of subsequent refinement and norming studies using the benchmarks developed in meeting two that will optimize their design for use in clinical trial contexts.