Colour discrimination and categorisation in Williams syndrome.
In Williams syndrome, color vision is shaky but color naming is solid—adjust visuals, not vocabulary.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tested how well people with Williams syndrome see and name colors.
They gave color vision tasks to a small group with WS and two groups without WS.
One group was the same age. The other group had similar mental ages.
What they found
People with WS made more mistakes telling colors apart than same-age peers.
Their scores matched the younger, ability-matched group instead.
When asked to sort colors into basic names like “red” or “blue,” they did just fine.
How this fits with other research
Miezah et al. (2020) later gave the full Woodcock-Johnson battery to more people with WS.
They also saw wide swings in scores, so one WS profile does not fit all.
Mulder et al. (2020) found a left-side bias when people with WS cut lines in half.
Both papers show visuospatial hiccups, but each in its own corner: color here, line judgment there.
Why it matters
Check color discrimination before you use color coding in lessons or token boards.
If the learner struggles, pick larger, brighter color steps or add text labels.
Keep teaching color words anyway—naming stays intact.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) present with impaired functioning of the dorsal visual stream relative to the ventral visual stream. As such, little attention has been given to ventral stream functions in WS. We investigated colour processing, a predominantly ventral stream function, for the first time in nineteen individuals with Williams syndrome. Colour discrimination was assessed using the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 hue test. Colour categorisation was assessed using a match-to-sample test and a colour naming task. A visual search task was also included as a measure of sensitivity to the size of perceptual colour difference. Results showed that individuals with WS have reduced colour discrimination relative to typically developing participants matched for chronological age; performance was commensurate with a typically developing group matched for non-verbal ability. In contrast, categorisation was typical in WS, although there was some evidence that sensitivity to the size of perceptual colour differences was reduced in this group.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.06.043