Recently improvement of mental disorders diagnostics and treatment has become of great importance because of increasing occurency of these disorders. Eye movements’ deficiency reflects various abnormalities in brain structures. Consequently the investigation of eye movements can be used as an auxiliary or additional tool for investigation of neural and mental disorders. Seminal work in this domain emerged more than a hundred year before but steady modern research has been carried on only during past forty years. The greatest attention is paid to research of smooth pursuit, saccades and antisacades. Recently eye tracking deficits are robust abnormalities in schizophrenia and may be used as markers for schizophrenic patients as well as for their first order relatives. However, the neurobiological background of this disorder is still unknown. New hypotheses still have been created and tested. On the other hand eye tracklng methodology also has been used to research not so frequent disorders such as autism, Williams syndrome or Tourette syndrome. Improvements in the hardware and methodology for recording of eye movements and especially digital video recording made it highly acceptable to investigate psychiatric patients as well as children or older participants.
There are several aims for investigating eye movements in psychiatry: a) to determine endophenotypes employable in studies of molecular genetics, b) to investigate physiological abnormalities in mental disorders, c) to investigate cognitive disorders of the insanes, d) to evaluate pharmacological impact on cognitive functions and their neurocorrelate.
