PaL Lab post-doc and BabyPal lead Ellie has published a new paper - 'Memory-Guided Saccades in Psychosis, and the Effects of Medication and Stimulus Location'. The vast majority of literature exploring memory-guided saccades has targeted the endophenotypic deficits associated with differences in target laterality, but less is known about how target amplitude might affect performance. So Ellie explored a memory-guided saccade task in neuroleptically medicated/non-medicated patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, & controls to see how their saccade behaviour would differ between near and far targets. Saccade gain control & final eye position were reduced in medicated-schizophrenia patients, but this reduction was even greater in targets with bigger amplitudes! Ellie also explored how positive and negative symptoms might influence performance in this task too, but found no clear group differences. The authors concluded that the results suggests that in this paradigm, diagnostic classification was more prominent in characterising disparities in saccade performance than symptomatology. Read the paper here!
