Poster Session: Characteristic differences in eye movements in people with Parkinson’s disease

Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative condition that impairs motor control, including oculomotor function. This study focuses on identifying characteristic differences in eye movements between people with Parkinson's diseases and healthy controls across four different tasks. Two static tasks, a fixation task and a tumbling E task, were measured using an adaptive optics scanning laser ophthalmoscope (AOSLO) to capture fixational eye movements with high spatial and temporal resolution. Two moving target tasks, guided saccade and smooth pursuit, were measured using the EyeLink 1000 Plus to study large-scale eye movements. Three participants with Parkinson's disease and three healthy control performed these tasks. In the fixation task, the participant fixated on a static target for 5s, and in the tumbling E task, an 'E' near the acuity limit was presented in different orientations for 0.7s. The guided saccade task required the participant to quickly shift their gaze between locations separated by 11ᵒ, while the smooth pursuit task involved tracking a smoothly moving target at two different speeds: 10ᵒ/s and 20ᵒ/s. Both moving target tasks were performed in horizontal and vertical directions. Oculomotor parameters such as saccade amplitude, saccade velocity, saccadic delay, saccadic rate, and intersaccadic intervals were extracted from the eye movement trace. Here we report the differences in these parameters between healthy controls and participants with Parkinson's disease.