- Tuesday, July 12th 2016 at 15:00 - 16:00 UK (Other timezones)
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CANTAB comprises a set of computerised neuropsychological tests employing what were in the 1980s (i) innovative touchscreen technology and (ii) cross-species translatability: in many cases, CANTAB employs either an up-translation from commonly used animal tests of cognition (e.g. delayed matching to sample test of recognition memory) to human tests, or animal versions of commonly used clinical neuropsychological tests (e.g. Wisconsin Card Sort Test). We were also able to capitalise on common theoretical themes, including animal learning and cognitive psychology. The main issues we confronted were how to calibrate tests across wide extents of intellectual competence that could be used e.g. for patients with dementia, psychiatric patients and healthy volunteers, and the usual psychometric issues of test-retest reliability etc. We sought to achieve validation of the cross-species translatability of the tests by using neuroimaging and pharmacological interventions to establish appropriate cross-species commonalities. The tests were not designed with neurocomputational applications in mind, but have been found useful in certain clinical contexts including detection of early dementia and for testing effects of drugs in a variety of clinical disorders. Recently, we have begin to work with a new computerised battery we have devised for testing motivational, emotional, and social cognitive functions, called EMOTICOM. Of course it would be useful to have web-base versions of these tests for testing large-scale populations; this is feasible in the context of ‘big-data’ – and I can also illustrate this approach via a recent attempt to validate a ‘compulsivity’ dimension, based on the use of the neurocomputational ‘two-stage’ choice task.
Professor Trevor W. Robbins CBE FRS FMedSci FBPsS
Head of Department
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Experimental Psychology