Do children with Williams syndrome fail to process visual configural information?
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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2021, Research in Developmental DisabilitiesCitation Excerpt :Individuals with WS did not differ from MA-matched controls in detecting relational differences, but resulted impaired in detecting featural differences, being their performance significantly lower than that of both control groups. In fact, configurational differences were more difficult to detect than featural ones for all participants, with the consequence that the accuracy were lower on configurational differences than on featural ones, but the performance of the WS group was significantly impaired with respect to the controls only for features, in line with studies suggesting a better performance for individuals with WS in configurational differences, as for example Bellugi, Lichtenberger, Jones, Lai, and St. George (2000), Deruelle et al. (2006), Tager-Flusberg et al. (2003). However, differently from previous evidence of advantage for individuals with WS with faces than other stimuli, the same pattern of results appeared with the House tasks.
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2016, NeuropsychologiaCitation Excerpt :The profile of face perception in TS is distinct and differs from normal controls. However, it is also different from the pattern presented by other clinical populations, who are impaired in face perception and recognition, such as ASD and Williams syndrome (Annaz et al., 2009; Behrmann et al., 2006; but see Deruelle et al. (2006)). The nature of face impairments in these latter syndromes are attributed to the lack of configural or holistic face processing and a preference for piecemeal processing style.
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2013, Research in Developmental DisabilitiesCitation Excerpt :However it is now recognised that a local-level bias in WS does not fully capture all aspects of visual-spatial ability. Performance of individuals with WS on the Children's Embedded Figures Test (Witkin, Oltman, Raskin, & Karp, 1971) shows a typical balance of local and global processing (Farran, Jarrold, & Gathercole, 2001, 2003, also see Deruelle, Rondan, Mancini, & Livet, 2006; Pani, Mervis, & Robinson, 1999). In this task participants find a local element (e.g. a triangle) within a global image (e.g. a child's pram), if individuals with WS did show a local-level bias one would expect rapid responses to this task if the participants is not having to inhibit processing of the global image's configuration.
Facilitating complex shape drawing in Williams syndrome and typical development
2013, Research in Developmental DisabilitiesCitation Excerpt :Until recently, this pattern of behaviour in WS had been explained by the local processing hypothesis which suggests that when copying an image, individuals with WS typically attempt to depict the details of the image but fail to replicate the overall spatial arrangement of these details (e.g. Bellugi, Sabo, & Vaid, 1988; Bellugi, Wang & Jernigan, 1994). Current understanding of visuo-spatial ability in WS accepts that a local-level bias does not characterise the visuo-spatial phenotype in WS as a whole (e.g. Farran, Jarrold, & Gathercole, 2001; Farran, Jarrold, & Gathercole, 2003, also see Deruelle, Rondan, Mancini, & Livet, 2006; Pani, Mervis, & Robinson, 1999). Hudson and Farran (2011) refuted the local processing hypothesis in a drawing task and suggested that poor drawing performance in WS might be due to a reduced ability to understand the relations of parts and an increased sensitivity to the complexity of images, relative to TD controls.