Bioengineering methods applied to an anthropological problem: eye movements of schizophrenics from different cultures

The authors report on a study of 88 Japanese schizophrenics from Kyushu and Okinawa who were examined for the smooth pursuit eye tracking dysfunction marker: 76% of the schizophrenics from Kyushu and 89% of those from Okinawa had pursuit dysfunction. The results of quantitative analyses of the data show that for all measures and at all target frequencies the schizophrenic subjects performed significantly worse than normal. The study demonstrates the robustness of the marker in a cross-cultural and interpopulational context. It also demonstrates that the method can be applied in a nonacademic (field) setting. The ubiquity of the marker in biologically and culturally diverse populations is believed to indicate a limit on the extent of meaningful etiologic heterogeneity likely to be discovered within the condition. The usefulness of bioengineering methods for studying a very basic anthropologic problem is demonstrated