ABSTRACT
Diefendorf and Dodge published registrations of eye movements in Dementia praecox patients that clearly show the staircase form of eye movements following a pendulum. If one assumes that the scores “positive velocity error” and “signal to noise ratio” can be seen as complex scores of more and/or larger saccades interspersed among pursuit eye movements, four other primary scores re-main: saccadic amplitude, saccadic frequency, spatial error, and eyeball arrests. If the abnormal eye movement behavior can be seen as a genetic marker for schizophrenia, it would be nice to know which score discriminates best between a control and a carrier of this genetic marker. In schizophrenics as well as in normals, the mean saccadic amplitude of the interspersed saccades among the pursuit eye movement shows a systematic increase when the stimulus moves faster. But schizophrenics show larger saccades than normals, for highest stimulus velocities they show somewhat smaller saccadic amplitudes.
