The anti-saccade (AS) task is a way of measuring how well the frontal lobe of the brain can control the reflexive saccade, or eye movement.
This theory was disproved by O’Driscoll et al. in a study that used positron emission tomography to analyze brain activity during anti-saccadic movement.
[2] Currently, the anti-saccade task is currently used as a relatively crude or basic assessment of frontal lobe function in patients with neurological or psychiatric disorders.
[1] Neurologic disorders affecting both the frontal cortex or the basal ganglia have shown impaired performance on the anti-saccade task.
In a well-known study by Guitton et al. (1985), patients with epilepsy who had undergone therapeutic removal of their dorsolateral prefrontal cortex were administered the anti-saccade task.
[9] In contrast, studies by Pierrot-Deseilligny et al. correlated high error rates of AS to specific lesions in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC).