Do children with Williams syndrome fail to process visual configural information?

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Abstract

Configural visual abilities in thirteen children with Williams syndrome (WS) compared to 13 children matched on mental age and 13 children matched on chronological age. Configural abilities were tested through four tasks (1) Silhouette (2) Fragmented (3) Mooney and (4) overlapping figures. In the first three tasks, it was necessary to take into account the global information, as the identification of the figures could not be established through a local analysis. In the fourth task, the global configuration of the display had to be ignored. Configural skills seem appropriate in the WS population. A possible dissociation between perceptual and visuo-constructive configural competences is discussed.

Section snippets

Configural grouping tasks

Each task in this part of the study needed the combination of fragmented information to form larger configurations. In other words, the perceiver must combine a number of individually meaningless parts to form a structured whole. If the hypothesis that configural processing is deficient in WS children is verified, they should then exhibit more difficulties than control participants in these tasks.

Overlapping figures

This task requires that participants ignore larger configurations in order to see targets at the local level. In contrast to the previous configural tasks, WS children should perform better than controls if they are less sensitive to configural information.

General discussion

Children with WS participated in a series of configural tasks in order to verify whether they possessed some or no configural processing capacities. The performance of the WS children is very similar to that of controls. These data may appear in sharp contrast with those showing a configural deficit in this population (Birhle et al., 1989).

So far, the visuo-spatial deficit in the WS population has mostly been documented in experiments relying on spatial components. The initial report that

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the French Regional Associations of Williams Syndrome (Associations du Sud Est and Rhone Alpes) and to the children and their parents for their participation in the study.

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