Human versus non-human face processing: evidence from Williams syndrome.
People with Williams syndrome read emotions accurately only from real human faces, so use photos or live models, not cartoons.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked people with Williams syndrome to read feelings from two kinds of faces. One set was real human photos. The other set showed cartoon or animal faces.
They used a simple match-the-emotion task. Each person saw happy, sad, angry, and scared faces. The study checked if answers were right or wrong.
What they found
Williams syndrome participants got the emotions right when the faces were human. They missed most emotions when the faces were not human.
The gap was clear. Human faces gave them an edge. Non-human faces did not help at all.
How this fits with other research
Mattavelli et al. (2021) widens the picture. They showed that the same group also uses big-picture cues for objects, not just faces. This tells us the human-face boost is special, not just a general seeing skill.
Hsu (2014) adds a twist. That study found people with Williams syndrome learn best when sound and pictures come together. So the face-only edge in Santos et al. (2009) might grow even stronger if you add matching voice cues.
Alfieri et al. (2021) places the skill next to autism. Kids with Williams syndrome out-talk kids with autism, even though both groups show similar daily-living delays. The strong human-face reading in Andreia’s study may feed their better expressive language.
Why it matters
If you teach a client with Williams syndrome, skip the emoji worksheets and cartoon feeling cards. Use real photos or live faces instead. Pair the face with the matching tone of voice to tap their cross-modal strength. This small swap can give you faster, more accurate emotion lessons on Monday morning.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Increased motivation towards social stimuli in Williams syndrome (WS) led us to hypothesize that a face's human status would have greater impact than face's orientation on WS' face processing abilities. Twenty-nine individuals with WS were asked to categorize facial emotion expressions in real, human cartoon and non-human cartoon faces presented upright and inverted. When compared to both chronological and mental age-matched controls, WS participants were able to categorize emotions from human, but not from non-human faces. The use of different perceptual strategies to process human and non-human faces could not explain this dissociation. Rather, the findings suggest an increased sensitivity to socially relevant cues, such as human facial features, possibly related to the hallmark feature of WS-hypersociability.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2009 · doi:10.1007/s10803-009-0789-1