Preserved contextual modulation of eye movements in psychosis prone individuals

The framework of predictive processing conceives perception as the integration of prior predictions and sensory data. An important source of priors is contextual information, including semantic context (i.e., the meaningful relationships between objects) and temporal context (i.e., the information provided by recent perceptual experiences). Alterations in the integration of priors and sensory data have been proposed to underlie psychotic experiences. Here, we examined the effects of semantic and temporal contextual information on eye movements in healthy individuals with low and high psychosis-proneness. Healthy participants were assigned to a low or a high psychosis-proneness group based on a questionnaire measuring delusional ideation. Effects of semantic and temporal context on eye movements were assessed using a naturalistic semantic task and a temporal task, respectively. Mixed models were used to investigate group-by-context condition interactions. Replicating previous findings, both tasks yielded robust effects of contextual information on eye movements. Crucially, however, no differences in the context effects in either task were detected between individuals with low and high psychosis proneness. Psychosis proneness in healthy individuals does not alter the impact of context information on eye-movement behavior. These findings are in contrast with previous reports of altered eye-movement behavior in clinical and subclinical psychosis, highlighting the need to delineate the experimental conditions and sample characteristics in which contextual modulation of eye movements is impaired.