Examining the Role of Schizotypy, Referential Beliefs, Aberrant Salience, and Delusional Beliefs on Eye Tracking Performance: An Anti-Saccade Stud

Current schizophrenia research has begun to focus on underlying factors and prodromal symptoms that can predict its onset. Schizotypy, a multi-faceted construct, has been useful in understanding schizophrenia liability and examining these symptoms in a non-clinical population. The Aberrant Salience model of schizophrenia suggests that dysfunctional dopamine processing leads to a tendency to over interpret benign events as meaningful. Referential beliefs are a prominent symptom of schizotypy in which individuals attach significance to environmental and internal experiences. The current study incorporated an emotional anti-saccade task used in past research in a non-clinical sample while examining scores on schizotypal cognition, referential beliefs, aberrant salience, delusional thinking, and social anxiety. The current study found strong relationships between these various schizotypal-related constructs. The strongest correlational relationship was between measures of aberrant salience and referential beliefs, although schizotypal cognition was also significantly correlated with aberrant salience. Multiple regression models showed that delusional thinking best predicted anti-saccade error rate, rather than schizotypal cognition as hypothesized. It is possible that the delusional thinking measure used in this study taps into the intensity of delusional cognition and may provide more clinical utility regarding the distress and conviction of a belief. The research using neurocognitive, neurobehavioral, and neurophysiological methods will continue to advance our understanding of schizophrenia-related pathology.