Van Gelder P, Anderson S, Herman E, Lebedev S, Tsui W H
Nathan S Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, Orangeburg, NY.
Compr Psychiatry. 1990 May-Jun;31(3):253-60. doi: 10.1016/0010-440x(90)90009-h.
A dysfunction of pursuit eye tracking in psychiatric patients has been well documented, but its cause has not. Recent speculation implicates a pathological disinhibition of saccades in these patients. However, great variability in tracking performance was found among nine normal subjects, and tracking quality improved in each when asked to perform a simple analysis of the tracking target: saccade counts and amplitudes decreased, as did a root-mean-square (RMS) error measure of overall tracking performance. This improvement was as great at the end as at the beginning of the analysis condition, suggesting that the improvement is not due to increased attention to a novel task, but rather is the preferred mode of tracking automatically, while attending to target analysis. The anticipatory, purposive saccades produced in attending to the act of tracking thus can be studied as involuntary attention effects reflecting frontal lobe function, and used for diagnostic classification of attentional dysfunction.
精神科患者追踪性眼球运动功能障碍已有充分记录，但其病因尚未明确。最近有推测认为，这些患者存在眼球快速运动的病理性去抑制现象。然而，研究发现9名正常受试者的追踪表现存在很大差异，并且当要求他们对追踪目标进行简单分析时，每个人的追踪质量都有所提高：眼球快速运动的次数和幅度减少，整体追踪表现的均方根误差测量值也降低。这种改善在分析阶段结束时与开始时一样显著，这表明这种改善并非由于对新任务的关注度增加，而是在关注目标分析时自动追踪的首选模式。因此，在关注追踪行为时产生的预期性、目的性眼球快速运动可作为反映额叶功能的非自主性注意效应进行研究，并用于注意功能障碍的诊断分类。
