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Schizophrenia Bulletin Advance Access published online on May 16, 2008
Schizophrenia Bulletin, doi:10.1093/schbul/sbn036
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

The Translation of Cognitive Paradigms for Patient Research

Steven J. Luck1,2 and James M. Gold3
2 Center for Mind & Brain and Department of Psychology, University of California, Davis
3 Department of Pshychiatry, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Maryland Psychiatric Research Center Baltimore, MD

1 To whom correspondence should be addressed; UC-Davis Center for Mind & Brain, 267 Cousteau Place, Davis, CA 95618; tel: +1-530-297-4424, fax: +1-530-297-4400, e-mail: sjluck{at}ucdavis.edu.

Many cognitive tasks have been developed by basic scientists to isolate and measure specific cognitive processes in healthy young adults, and these tasks have the potential to provide important information about cognitive dysfunction in psychiatric disorders, both in psychopathology research and in clinical trials. However, several practical and conceptual challenges arise in translating these tasks for patient research. Here we outline a paradigm development strategy—which involves iteratively testing modifications of the tasks in college students, in older healthy adults, and in patients—that we have used to successfully translate a large number of cognitive tasks for use in schizophrenia patients. This strategy makes it possible to make the tasks patient friendly while maintaining their cognitive precision. We also outline several measurement issues that arise in these tasks, including differences in baseline performance levels and speed-accuracy trade-offs, and we provide suggestions for addressing these issues. Finally, we present examples of 2 experiments, one of which exemplifies our recommendations regarding measurement issues and was a success and one of which was a painful but informative failure.

Keywords: cognitive assessment / schizophrenia / task development / speed-accuracy tradeoffs


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