Project 7

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This application requests five years of support to establish a multidisciplinary research center at UCLA entitled "Translational Research to Enhance Cognitive Control (TRECC)" as a part of the NIMH Centers for Intervention Development and Applied Research (CIDAR) program. Utilizing our expertise in animal models, cognitive neuroscience, neuroimaging, neuropsychopharmacology, behavioral therapies, genetics, we will advance the science of treatment approaches for the cognitive deficits common to a large number of neuropsychiatric disorders afflicting children and adolescents. We will especially focus on pediatric disorders with prominent problems of cognitive control, particularly the often overlapping disorders of Attention- Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Tourette Syndrome (TS), due to their unmet treatment needs, prevalence, morbidity and comorbidity, and shared pathophysiologic features. Ultimately, we believe our work will be relevant to an even larger group of children with other conditions, but who share the dimension of significant deficits in behavior regulation, cognitive processing, and judgement. The central theme of the UCLA CIDAR TRECC Center is the understanding and modeling of the mechanisms underlying cognitive deficits shared by a range of developmental psychopathologies leading to the development and testing of targeted and more efficacious treatments to enhance cognition in these conditions. Our focus is in direct response to the PA's call for the development of treatment approaches for clinical targets of illnesses which clearly influence morbidity but which are not sufficiently remediated by extant treatments. Impaired cognition in developmental psychopathologies clearly serves as a major determinant of functioning and long-term outcome. There is a great need to recognize cognitive enhancement in pediatric disorders as a primary treatment target and to develop and test new treatment approaches. If successful, such efforts hold the promise of significantly improving the long-term outcome of individuals with these disabilities. The UCLA CIDAR Center will approach this theme through the completion of four interacting multi-level studies in animals and humans, utilizing the resources developed and made available through three research cores supported by the CIDAR Center.