The Effects of Individual Differences on Cued Antisaccade Performance

Abstract

In the antisaccade task, pre-cueing the location of a correct response has the paradoxical effect of increasing errors. It has been suggested that this effect occurs because participants adopt an "antisaccade task set" and treat the cue as if was a target - directing attention away from the precue and towards the location of the impending target. This hypothesis was tested using a mixed pro / antisaccade task. In addition the effects of individual differences in working memory capacity and schizotypal personality traits on performance were examined. Whilst we observed some modest relationships between these individual differences and antisaccade performance, the strongest predictor of antisaccade error rate was uncued prosaccade latency.