Atypical development of configural face recognition in children with autism, Down syndrome and Williams syndrome.
Use mental age, not birthday age, when testing face skills in autism, Down, or Williams syndrome.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Spriggs et al. (2015) tracked how kids with autism, Down syndrome, or Williams syndrome learn to spot faces. They looked at configural face recognition, the skill that lets you tell two faces apart.
The team mapped each group's growth curve and compared it to typical peers. They wanted to see if the three groups follow the same path, just slower, or take a different route.
What they found
All three groups showed atypical growth curves. Their face-recognition skill did not rise in step with their birthdays.
The gap between chronological age and skill level stayed wide, so using age alone can mislead you.
How this fits with other research
Spanoudis et al. (2011) saw autistic kids shift toward mid-spatial frequencies with age, while Williams kids never did. D et al. now show the same split in configural processing, so the two findings line up.
Godfrey et al. (2019) and Amaral et al. (2017) show that Down-plus-autism is its own profile. D et al. add that these kids also have a unique face-recognition curve, so test mental age, not just the Down label.
Palomares et al. (2011) found that Williams visual skills grow with mental age, not calendar age. D et al. echo this for face tasks, giving you one clear rule: score by mental age across all three groups.
Why it matters
If you test face recognition, swap chronological age for mental age when writing goals. A child with Williams syndrome may score like a typical four-year-old even at eight. The same rule applies to autism and Down syndrome. Adjusting the baseline keeps expectations fair and targets clear.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Configural processing in face recognition is a sensitivity to the spacing between facial features. It has been argued both that its presence represents a high level of expertise in face recognition, and also that it is a developmentally vulnerable process. METHOD: We report a cross-syndrome investigation of the development of configural face recognition in school-aged children with autism, Down syndrome and Williams syndrome compared with a typically developing comparison group. Cross-sectional trajectory analyses were used to compare configural and featural face recognition utilising the 'Jane faces' task. Trajectories were constructed linking featural and configural performance either to chronological age or to different measures of mental age (receptive vocabulary, visuospatial construction), as well as the Benton face recognition task. RESULTS: An emergent inversion effect across age for detecting configural but not featural changes in faces was established as the marker of typical development. Children from clinical groups displayed atypical profiles that differed across all groups. CONCLUSION: We discuss the implications for the nature of face processing within the respective developmental disorders, and how the cross-sectional syndrome comparison informs the constraints that shape the typical development of face recognition.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2015 · doi:10.1111/jir.12141