This project uses experimental psychological techniques to examine whether schizophrenic deficits in ocular-motor, cognitive and social tasks result from an impaired ability to suppress inappropriate responses linked to dysfunction of the prefrontal cortex and related brain areas. Data collection from our core sample of 65 medicated schizophrenics and 44 matched normal subjects is complete and further data collection has been stopped. This year, we continued the tasks of preparing our data for analysis and carrying out analyses of already prepared data. We paid particular attention to data from a wide range of saccadic eye movement tasks. We also carried out preliminary Structural Equation Model Analyses examining performance across our experimental tasks and linking the resultant latent factors to theoretically relevant background and psychological and background characteristics of our schizophrenic and control subjects. These preliminary analyses continue to raise the possibility of a particular memory deficit in schizophrenic individuals in the 50 to 150 ms range. If this is the case, it would also suggest that schizophrenics may not experience reality as a continuous flow.
