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Smooth pursuit eye tracking and neuro‐psychological performance in healthy volunteers
Author(s) -
Bartfai A.,
Wirsén A.,
Levander S.,
Schalling D.
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
acta psychiatrica scandinavica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.849
H-Index - 146
eISSN - 1600-0447
pISSN - 0001-690X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0447.1989.tb03009.x
Subject(s) - psychology , smooth pursuit , audiology , neuropsychology , eye movement , eye tracking , schizophrenia (object oriented programming) , perception , perspective (graphical) , cognitive psychology , cognition , neuroscience , artificial intelligence , medicine , psychiatry , computer science
— Eye movement dysfunction (EMD) has been repeatedly found in schizophrenics and their first‐degree relatives. In the present study, smooth pursuit eye tracking was measured in healthy subjects and related to performance on computerized neuropsychological tasks assumed to involve frontal or frontoparietal functions: monitoring perspective fluctuations (Necker cube), finger tapping, trail making, reaction time (RT) and a perceptual maze test. Poor trackers performed worse on tasks requiring parallel processing (trail making with letters and digits and RT with random auditory signals for response inhibition) and made more errors and cancellations on the mazes. Results are in line with our earlier EMD results on schizophrenics, showing poor performance on frontal tasks. However, their deficiency was more pervasive, whereas the present healthy EMD subjects only had difficulties with more complex tasks. The results are of interest in view of the recent evidence that EMD may be a genetic marker for vulnerability to schizophrenia.