FEATURES OF OCULOMOTOR REACTIONS IN HIGHLY ANXIOUS VOLUNTEERS WITH DIFFERENT LEVEL OF IMPULSITY IN SOLVING DIFFERENT TYPES OF THE ANTI-SACCADE TASK

Zhurnal Vysshei Nervnoi Deyatelnosti Imeni I.P. Pavlova. 2023. Vol. 73. No. 3. P. 411–424.

G. M. Khayrullina, Panfilova E. A., O. V. Martynova

Introduction. Impulsivity, manifested in the difficulty of suppressing certain actions, is often associated
with increased anxiety. Depending on the level of impulsivity, individuals with higher anxiety
react differently to tasks requiring inhibitory control. The anti-saccade task is one of the psychophysiological
approaches to assessing visual attention and inhibitory control. This study aimed to
test a hypothesis that individuals with high levels of impulsivity and anxiety would have different eye
movement patterns in the anti-saccade task compared to highly anxious individuals with low levels
of impulsivity. Methods. Twenty volunteers with low impulsivity and fourteen volunteers with higher
impulsivity performed 3 blocks of anti-saccade tasks, differing in the effect of Step, Gap, and
Overlap with fixation and target stimuli of negative, positive, and neutral emotional valence. All
participants had increased trait and state anxiety. The eye-movement patterns were recorded using
an eye-tracking method. Results. Significant differences were observed between groups in the regular
error mean latency in the Overlap block and the regular error mean amplitude in the Gap block.
The Overlap effect caused longer latencies of erroneous saccades while the Gap effect produced
lower amplitudes of erroneous saccades in the group with increased trait impulsivity in the tasks
where neutral stimuli were used either as fixation or target stimuli. Conclusion. Our findings imply
that different designs of the anti-saccade task are able to reveal specific patterns of eye movements
associated with attention switching and inhibitory control in impulsive behavior.

Keywords: anxiety, eye tracking, impulsivity, inhibitory control, anti-saccade task