Farber R H, Clementz B A, Swerdlow N R
Department of Psychology, University of California-San Diego, La Jolla 92093-0109, USA.
Psychophysiology. 1997 Mar;34(2):157-62. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.1997.tb02126.x.
Twenty obsessive-compulsive disorder patients and comparison samples of 20 schizophrenia and 20 nonpsychiatric individuals were presented with (a) a step-ramp task designed to measure smooth pursuit initiation and (b) a regular ramp task designed to measure steady-state tracking performance. Obsessive-compulsive disorder and non-psychiatric individuals had statistically similar pursuit reaction time and average eye accelerations during the open-loop interval. They also had similar closed-loop performance. Schizophrenia patients, however, had delayed pursuit reaction times and reduced eye acceleration during the last 60 ms of the open-loop interval. These findings suggest that brain regions supporting smooth pursuit performance are unimpaired among obsessive-compulsive disorder patients. Furthermore, the deficits found in the schizophrenia patients replicate and extend the results of previous smooth pursuit studies.
