This overview describes the goals and objectives of the second conference conducted as part of the Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (CNTRICS) initiative. This second conference was informed by a series of online surveys and brought together basic and clinical scientists from academia and industry to address the concerns central to each field of research. Our goal was to develop recommendations for future research addressing the psychometric and practical challenges involved in translating paradigms from cognitive neuroscience into tasks that are feasible for use in the treatment discovery and development process. In this overview article, we describe the series of talks that were presentations at the conference. This article serves as an introduction to the set of articles included in this special issue that provide overviews and discussions of the issues raised and the recommendations made in these talks and in the subsequent discussions at the meeting. In addition, we describe the online surveys conducted in the month before the conference that were used to obtain suggestions from the field as to important task selection criteria and to generate initial benchmark goals for psychometric development for cognitive neuroscience tasks.