title: The NEWMEDS rodent touchscreen test battery for cognition relevant to schizophrenia.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The NEWMEDS initiative (Novel Methods leading to New Medications in Depression and Schizophrenia, http://www.newmeds-europe.com ) is a large industrial-academic collaborative project aimed at developing new methods for drug discovery for schizophrenia. As part of this project, Work package 2 (WP02) has developed and validated a comprehensive battery of novel touchscreen tasks for rats and mice for assessing cognitive domains relevant to schizophrenia.
  
  
  OBJECTIVE
  This article provides a review of the touchscreen battery of tasks for rats and mice for assessing cognitive domains relevant to schizophrenia and highlights validation data presented in several primary articles in this issue and elsewhere.
  
  
  METHODS
  The battery consists of the five-choice serial reaction time task and a novel rodent continuous performance task for measuring attention, a three-stimulus visual reversal and the serial visual reversal task for measuring cognitive flexibility, novel non-matching to sample-based tasks for measuring spatial working memory and paired-associates learning for measuring long-term memory.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The rodent (i.e. both rats and mice) touchscreen operant chamber and battery has high translational value across species due to its emphasis on construct as well as face validity. In addition, it offers cognitive profiling of models of diseases with cognitive symptoms (not limited to schizophrenia) through a battery approach, whereby multiple cognitive constructs can be measured using the same apparatus, enabling comparisons of performance across tasks.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This battery of tests constitutes an extensive tool package for both model characterisation and pre-clinical drug discovery.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK. mh473@cam.ac.uk.|MRC and Wellcome Trust Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK. mh473@cam.ac.uk.
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Hvoslef-Eide
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.|MRC and Wellcome Trust Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.|Department of Neuroscience and Physiology, New York University Medical Center, New York, NY, 10016, USA.
authors.forename: A C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Mar
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.|MRC and Wellcome Trust Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.
authors.forename: S R O
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Nilsson
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.|MRC and Wellcome Trust Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.|Department of Neuroscience, Unit of Functional Neurobiology, University of Uppsala, 75124, Uppsala, Sweden.
authors.forename: J
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Alsiö
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.|MRC and Wellcome Trust Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.
authors.forename: C J
authors.initials: CJ
authors.lastname: Heath
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.|MRC and Wellcome Trust Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.
authors.forename: L M
authors.initials: LM
authors.lastname: Saksida
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.|MRC and Wellcome Trust Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.
authors.forename: T W
authors.initials: TW
authors.lastname: Robbins
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.|MRC and Wellcome Trust Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3EB, UK.
authors.forename: T J
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Bussey
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D014150:Antipsychotic Agents / Q000009:adverse effects* / Q000627:therapeutic use*; D003071:Cognition / Q000187:drug effects*; D003072:Cognition Disorders / Q000523:psychology; D003216:Conditioning, Operant / Q000187:drug effects; D051379:Mice; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000187:drug effects; D051381:Rats; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000188:drug therapy*; D012565:Schizophrenic Psychology
chemical_list: D014150:Antipsychotic Agents
keywords: Attention; Cognitive flexibility; Drug discovery; Executive function; Long-term memory; Mouse; Neuropsychiatric disease; Rat; Response inhibition; Working memory