Social-perceptual abilities in adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome

Abstract

People with Williams syndrome (WMS) have a unique social phenotype characterised by unusually strong interest in other people and an engaging and empathic personality. Two experiments were designed to test whether this phenotype is associated with relatively spared abilities to decode mental-state information from nonverbal cues. The first experiment involved a modified version of the revised Eyes Test. The second experiment probed the ability to label emotions from brief dynamic facial displays. Adolescents and adults with WMS were compared to age-, IQ-, and language-matched participants with learning/intellectual disabilities, and age-matched normal controls. In both experiments the WMS group performed at a significantly lower level than the normal controls, and no different from the well-matched comparison-group with intellectual disabilities. These findings, contradicting earlier reports in the literature, argue against the view that in WMS social-perceptual abilities are relatively spared and can explain the social profile associated with this neurodevelopmental disorder.

Theory of Mind in Williams Syndrome Assessed Using a Nonverbal Task

“…And again, WS individuals may have used their superior vocabularies to pass this task. In any case, research also exists to suggest that emotion perception abilities in WS are commensurate with their general level of intellect (Plesa-Skwerer et al 2006;Porter 2004).…”

Looking and thinking: How individuals with Williams syndrome make judgements about mental states

“…The ability to ascribe such 'mental states' to others is critical for understanding others' minds and therefore adapting our own behaviour. Tager-Flusberg, Boshart and Baron-Cohen (1998) and Plesa Skwerer et al (2006b) have explored mental state understanding in WS using the 'Reading the Mind from the Eyes' task (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Hill, Raste, & Plumb, 2001) and report variable findings (due to differences across studies in task design, see Riby & Back 2010 for discussion) but importantly both show that performance is below that expected by CA in typical development. In research using more ecologically valid whole faces expressing different mental states, and linking directly to the task used in the current study, Riby and Back (2010) showed that when the whole face was available for interpretation individuals with WS were proficient at processing mental states but that they were largely relying on the eye region to do so, when the eye region became uninformative through computer manipulation performance significantly reduced for individuals with WS compared to those developing typically.…”

Neurodevelopmental and behavioral issues in Williams syndrome

“…Studies of emotion recognition have revealed performance at the level of age-and IQ-matched controls using face stimuli [ 52 ] and faces and voices [ 53 ]. In addition, whereas individuals with WS show empathy, they have diffi culty with more complex social cognitive tasks, such as theory of mind, performing only at mental age level [ 52 ].…”