CNTRICS Final Task Selection: Control of Attention
2 Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California, Los Angeles, 300 UCLA Medical Plaza, Room 2240, Los Angeles, CA 90095-6968
3 Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles
4 Center for Mind and Brain, University of California, Davis
5 Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis
6 Department of Psychology, University of Michigan
1 To whom correspondence should be addressed; tel: 310-825-0036, fax: 310-206-3651, e-mail: keithn{at}ucla.edu.
The construct of attention has many facets that have been examined in human and animal research and in healthy and psychiatrically disordered conditions. The Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (CNTRICS) group concluded that control of attention—the processes that guide selection of task-relevant inputs—is particularly impaired in schizophrenia and could profit from further work with refined measurement tools. Thus, nominations for cognitive tasks that provide discrete measures of control of attention were sought and were then evaluated at the third CNTRICS meeting for their promise for future use in treatment development. This article describes the 5 nominated measures and their strengths and weaknesses for cognitive neuroscience work relevant to treatment development. Two paradigms, Guided Search and the Distractor Condition Sustained Attention Task, were viewed as having the greatest immediate promise for development into tools for treatment research in schizophrenia and are described in more detail by their nominators.
Keywords: attention / cognition / cognitive neuroscience / treatment development
Coauthors had equivalent input and are listed in alphabetical order.
Received for publication September 21, 2008. Revision received October 12, 2008. Accepted for publication October 13, 2008.