Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 37, Issue 6, 15 March 1995, Pages 394-401
Biological Psychiatry

Original article
Antisaccades and smooth pursuit eye movements in schizophrenia

https://doi.org/10.1016/0006-3223(94)00127-OGet rights and content

Saccadic and smooth pursuit eye movements were recorded in schizophrenic patients, nonschizophrenic psychiatric patients, and normal controls. Both schizophrenic subjects and psychiatric controls demonstrated greater increases in error rates and greater delays in generating antisaccades than did normal controls. Schizophrenic patients with impaired smooth pursuit tracking showed greater increases in error rates in the antisaccade task than did schizophrenic patients with normal pursuit. Among psychiatric controls, increased errors on the antisaccade task were unrelated to pursuit performance. The small size of this group, however, reduces the power to detect a relation between smooth pursuit tracking and performance on the antisaccade task. Although most patients were receiving one or more medications, some of which can affect eye movements, medication state in this study did not account for differences we report in dependent variables.

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      In schizophrenia, deficits in executive function are well-established and include reduced attentional control, inhibition, and working memory (for meta-analyses, see Forbes et al., 2009; Lee and Park, 2005; Minzenberg et al., 2009; Niendam et al., 2012; Westerhausen et al., 2011). Antisaccade impairments, which are robust findings in schizophrenia (Sereno and Holzman, 1995; Whitford et al., 2013; reviewed in Gooding and Basso, 2008), are thought to reflect deficits in inhibition and working memory (Crawford et al., 2011; Unsworth et al., 2004). As in dyslexia, the relationship between executive function and standardized reading performance in schizophrenia has been little evaluated, with only one study reporting a positive correlation between executive function and reading comprehension.

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    This work was supported in part by USPHS Grants MH31340, MH44866, MH31154, and MH K05 01021 awarded to the second author, and by the Stanley Foundation Research Award, awarded to the first author.

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