Smooth-pursuit eye tracking in first-episode psychotic patients and their relatives.

Abstract

We wished to determine the specificity of smooth-pursuit eye tracking dysfunction to schizophrenia and the prevalences of dysfunction among functionally psychotic and normal individuals. Therefore, we investigated pursuit tracking in a large sample of psychotic patients, normal subjects, and first-degree relatives (N = 482). Patients were recruited as part of an epidemiological study of first-episode psychosis that used a broadly based referral network to identify all cases in a major metropolitan area over a 2'/2-year period. Patients received diagnoses of schizophrenia, schizophreniform disorder, psychotic mood disorder, and paranoid or other psychotic disorder based on the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of 'Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association, 1980). The distribution of tracking performance was bimodal for the schizophrenic patients and their relatives, perhaps reflecting major gene action. Moreover, poor tracking ran in families. Pursuit tracking dysfunction was relatively specific to schizophrenic patients and their relatives and occurred infrequently in other psychotic patients and normal subjects.In many independent investigations an association between smooth-pursuit eye tracking impairment and schizophrenia has been documented (for recent reviews, see lacono, 1988). First-degree relatives of schizophrenic individuals, including their twins, are also likely to show oculomotor dysfunction (Holzman et al, 1988;Matthysse, Holzman, & Lange, 1986). Some have speculated that deviant pursuit oculomotion is a psychophysiological marker of genetic predisposition to schizophrenia, and a genetic model has been advanced to account for some family data (Holzman et al., 1988). Holzman et al. (1988) and Matthysse et al. (1986) have posited that almost all cases of schizophrenia can be accounted for by a latent trait governed by a dominant gene. The expression of the gene is hypothesized to be pleiotropic, with carriers manifesting schizophrenia, dysfunctional pursuit tracking, or both traits.

Bipolar and schizophrenic patients differ in patterns of visual motion discrimination

“…Some studies have reported impaired smooth pursuit eye movements in bipolar patients (Shagass et al, 1974;Levin et al, 1981;Iacono et al, 1982;Holzman et al, 1984), whereas other studies showed no difference between affective disorder patients and controls (Holzman et al, 1974;Iacono et al, 1992;Friedman et al, 1995). Several studies found that relatives of affective disorder patients and controls did not differ in eye tracking performance (Levy et al, 1983(Levy et al, , 1993Rosenberg et al, 1997; but see Kathmann et al, 2003).…”

Schizophrenia: The broken P300 and beyond

“…As with smooth pursuit eye-tracking abnormalities~Iacono, Moreau, Beiser, Fleming, & Lin, 1992!, electrodermal nonresponsivity~Iacono, Ficken, & Beiser, 1999!, and neuroanatomical abnormalities~Sharma et al, 1997!, P300 reduction is seen in unaffected biological relatives of Figure 8. Event-related potentials~ERPs!…”

Modeling object pursuit for 3D interactive tasks in virtual reality

“…Pursuit is one of the important human skills that have been used, for example, to differentiate normal subjects from psychiatric patients [12,8,9] or to qualify a pilot [11,19]. Given the parts of the human body that are used, pursuit can be categorized into eye movement [13,3], locomotion [4], manual tasks [21], etc.…”