The Relationship of Schizotypy and Saccade Performance in Patients With Schizophrenia and Non-Clinical Individuals

Abstract: Deficits in saccade performance (i.e., rapid eye movements) are commonly observed in people with schizophrenia. Investigations of the schizotypy-saccade relationship have been exclusively explored in non-clinical individuals, with mixed findings. Of the three saccadic paradigms, research has predominantly focused on the antisaccade paradigm, while the relationship between schizotypy and prosaccade and memory-guided saccade performance remains underexplored. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between schizotypy and saccade performance across the three saccadic paradigms in both patients and non-clinical individuals. Sixty-two patients with schizophrenia/schizoaffective disorder and 148 non-clinical individuals completed the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences (O-LIFE) self-report questionnaire as a measure of schizotypy. All participants also completed a prosaccade, memory-guided saccade and antisaccade task. Canonical correlation analyses were conducted to examine the collective, multivariate relationship between the set of schizotypy variables and the sets of prosaccade, memory-guided saccade and antisaccade variables. Differences between patients and non-clinical groups were in line with previous research. In the non-clinical group, Cognitive Disorganisation was the highest contributing variable to prosaccade performance and prosaccade latency was the highest contributing variable to schizotypy. There was no significant relationship between schizotypy and memory-guided or antisaccade performance. No significant relationships between schizotypy and saccade performance were observed in the patient group. Our findings suggest a relationship between disorganized schizotypy and basic processing speed in non-clinical individuals. This relationship was not observed in patients, suggesting that sub-clinical saccade performance may not mirror impairments observed in schizophrenia. Our findings in the non-clinical group were inconsistent with previous studies. These used different schizotypy inventories, suggesting that schizotypy measures derived from different conceptual backgrounds may not be comparable.