People with Williams syndrome process faces holistically

Social-perceptual abilities in adolescents and adults with Williams syndrome

“…They found that participants with WMS rated faces as more approachable and more trustworthy than did control groups, which is consistent with anecdotal reports about the indiscriminant trust and friendliness of people with WMS toward strangers. Furthermore, in contrast to the findings reported by Tager-Flusberg et al (1998), several studies found that children and adults with WMS were no better than matched controls in labelling or discriminating basic emotions expressed in faces (Gagliardi, Frigerio, Burt, Cazzaniga, Perrett, & Borgatti, 2003;TagerFlusberg & Sullivan, 2000), despite their relative strength in recognising facial identity as measured on standardised tests such as the Benton Test of Facial Recognition (Bellugi et al, 1988;Bellugi, Wang, & Jernigan, 1994;Tager-Flusberg, Plesa Skwerer, Faja, & Joseph, 2003;Wang, Doherty, Rourke, & Bellugi, 1995).…”

The tortuous route from genes to behavior: A neuroconstructivist approach

“…In our studies of WS, we examined in detail the domain of face processing (Karmiloff-Smith et al, 2004), since this is a domain for which many authors have claimed intactness of the functioning of a face-processing module in WS, analogous to that found in typical development (e.g., Bellugi et al, 1994;Rossen, Jones, Wang, & Klima, 1995;Tager-Flusberg et al, 2003). We challenged this conclusion on several fronts.…”

“…Researchers have focused on a number of genetically based disorders to assert the existence of a juxtaposition of modular deficits and preservations. For example, language and face processing have been claimed to be preserved in the neurodevelopmental genetic disorder known as Williams syndrome (WS; Bellugi, Marks, Bihrle, & Sabo, 1988;Bellugi, Wang, & Jernigan, 1994;Clahsen & Almazan, 1998;Pinker, 1994Pinker, , 1999Rossen, Klima, Bellugi, Bihrle, & Jones, 1996;Tager-Flusberg et al, 1998;Tager-Flusberg, Plesa-Skwerer, Faja, & Joseph, 2003). The impressive behavioral proficiency in WS with language and face processing has been found to coexist with a mean IQ of 56 (Mervis, Robinson, Rowe, Becerra, & Klein-Tasman, 2004) and with seriously impaired spatial and numerical cognition Donnai & KarmiloffSmith, 2000).…”

Constraints on Multiple Object Tracking in Williams Syndrome: How Atypical Development Can Inform Theories of Visual Processing

“…Measures of object recognition, visual-motor action, orientation discrimination, and orientation integration all follow a pattern among people with WS that suggests that the internal structure of their spatial representations is similar to that of TD children, albeit at a much younger age (Dilks et al, 2008;Landau et al, 2006;Palomares et al, 2009). Other researchers have reported evidence of qualitatively similar representations in the domain of face representation (Tager-Flusberg, Plesa-Skwerer, Faja, & Joseph, 2003). These findings are remarkable in the context of what is known about the many atypicalities of the WS brain (as reviewed earlier), yet at the level of cognition, many representational properties-across domains as different as language and visual-spatial reasoning-are preserved (see Musolino & Landau, 2010).…”