Dr. Raymond Chan of the Neuropsychology and Applied Cognitive Neuroscience (NACN) Laboratory, the CAS Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, and Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, was invited to organize a symposium titled “Evolving perspectives on cognitive, biological and clinical dimensions of risk for psychosis in adolescence” at the 29^th Annual Convention of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in Boston during May 25-28^th 2017. The APS is an international psychological association dedicated to enhancing cutting-edge research in psychological science. It is one of the most influential associations of psychology. The Association currently has more than 33,000 members throughout the world. The Association holds two meetings per year.  The Annual Convention is held in May within United States of America and the other one will be held in Europe. During this Boston convention, a total of 4 international renowned scholars specializing in early psychosis, especially in schizophrenia spectrum disorders were invited to give their most updated research findings in psychosis, including Profs. Larry Seidman, William Stone, Dost Ongur from Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Chan from the Institute of Psychology. Dr. Chan had made a presentation on the title of “Distinct developmental trajectories of schizotypy and their emotional and social functioning”, which shows that schizotypy follows multiple, distinct trajectories over time, with some showing closer associations to the development of schizophrenia than others. Prof. Seidman presented his work in identifying neurocognition, brain structure and function in families affected by schizophrenia as well as in persons presented with attenuated psychosis syndrome. Prof. Stone focused on the development of normal and abnormal cognitive function and the identification of cognitive measures related to conversion to psychosis in his early psychosis programme. Prof. Ongur focused on a novel approach to studying metabolic abnormalities in the development of schizophrenia. Finally, the symposium also invited Prof. Matcheri Keshavan from Harvard Medical School to comment the talks and integrate these varying novel approaches to identify abnormalities related to the development of schizophrenia. During this convention, Dr. Ya Wang from NACN Laboratory also made a poster presentation on “The Effect of Implementation Intention on Prospective Memory Performance in Patients with Schizophrenia: A Multinomial Modeling Approach”. 

During this trip, Dr. Raymond Chan was also invited to visit Prof. Ongur’s team at McLean Hospital, Prof. Larry Seidman’s team at Massachusetts Mental Health Centre, and Dr. Susan Whitfield-Gabrielli at MIT. Dr. Chan had made several presentations of his team’s most recent work on brain connectivity of individuals with schizophrenia, their unaffected first-degree relatives and individuals with schizotypy. They also started off in-depth discussion and exploration of research potential that further strengthened the existing collaborations.