Original ArticlesAge Diminishes Performance on an Antisaccade Eye Movement Task
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Subjects
Subjects were 42 hospital employees, their relatives, and people recruited from advertisements. Exclusion criteria included current or past psychoses, neurological disorders, or a family history of schizophrenia. After complete description of the study to the subjects, written informed consent was obtained. Twenty (41%) of the subjects were male. The age of the subjects ranged from 19–79 years with 5–10 subjects in each decade. The level of education for the subjects ranged from 8–22 years
Results
A significant effect of age was detected in both the visually guided and the antisaccade tasks. In the visually guided task, advancing age decreased the subjects’ ability to initiate movement towards the target, measured as increased latency. Aging also decreased the accuracy of the visually guided saccade, once initiated, by seven one hundredths of a percent/year. Fig. 1 shows performance of a younger subject and an older subject on a portion of the visually guided task. The older subject
Discussion
Performance on the visually guided and antisaccade eye movement tasks provides information about the effects of age on motor initiation, inhibition of response, and accuracy of visuo-spatial memory. Motor initiation, as measured by latency, is slowed in both tasks. Longer latencies have been reported in previous studies of saccadic reflexive tasks in aged individuals [19]; slower reaction times in aging have also been found with other paradigms as well [4]. However, the antisaccade task
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