By observing the eye movements of schizophrenia patients
while playing a simple video game, a University of British Columbia researcher
has discovered a potential explanation for some of their symptoms, including
difficulty with everyday tasks.
The research, published in a recent issue of the Journal of
Neuroscience, shows that, compared to healthy controls, schizophrenia patients
had a harder time tracking a moving dot on the computer monitor with their eyes
and predicting its trajectory. But the impairment of their eye movements was
not severe enough to explain the difference in their predictive performance,
suggesting a breakdown in their ability to interpret what they saw.