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

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 psycho-physiological 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.