Smooth Pursuit Eye Movements to Extraretinal Motion Signals

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Abstract
A WEALTH of evidence, including a preliminary report of linkage of the pursuit abnormality to chromosome 6p21 in relatives of patients with schizophrenia, suggests that the smooth pursuit defect marks the genetic liability to schizophrenia.1,2 Despite these rich data, fundamental aspects of smooth pursuit function remain unexamined in these disorders. Toward this goal of determining the precise mechanism underlying the abnormality, individual components of smooth pursuit need to be evaluated. The smooth pursuit system, which is dependent on motion information to generate smooth eye movements, initiates smooth pursuit based on the slippage of the image of the target on the retina (henceforth called retinal motion). Once the moving image is captured onto the fovea and the eye approximates the target motion, smooth pursuit is maintained mostly on the basis of information from sources other than the retina.3 There are potentially 2 sources of extraretinal motion information—the memory of the motor command (so-called efference copy) and the memory of previous retinal motion.3-5

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