Associations between smooth pursuit, predictive pursuit, anomalous self-experiences, and psychotic-like experiences.

Oculomotor dysfunction is well-documented in the psychosis spectrum, particularly deficits in smooth pursuit eye movements. These disruptions are thought to serve as endophenotypic markers of psychosis vulnerability and more recent work has linked oculomotor dysfunction with alterations in agency, a core feature of the psychosis spectrum. Understanding this link between oculomotor impairment, agency, and psychosis can provide insight into key mechanisms of psychosis vulnerability. To address this gap, we utilized an eye tracking paradigm to examine smooth and predictive pursuit in 100 young-adults, recruited with an enriched sampling strategy to represent a range of severity of distress associated with psychotic-like experiences. Relationships with positive psychotic-like experiences, agentic symptoms, depression, anxiety, and cognitive symptoms were investigated. There was a significant relationship between distress associated with overall positive psychotic-like experiences and bizarre experiences with frequency of catch-up saccades on both smooth pursuit (r = 0.25, p = 0.012; r = 0.27, p