Intact attentional orienting towards inverted faces revealed by both manual responses and eye-movement measurement in individuals with Williams syndrome.
Inverted faces don’t trigger atypical attention in Williams syndrome—upright configural processing is the key driver.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team showed upright and upside-down faces to people with Williams syndrome.
They tracked eye movements and timed button presses.
A control group did the same tasks so the researchers could compare results.
What they found
People with Williams syndrome looked at and clicked on upside-down faces just as fast and as accurately as the control group.
The study found no special pull toward inverted faces in Williams syndrome.
Only upright faces trigger the well-known extra face gaze seen in this group.
How this fits with other research
Cramm et al. (2009) first showed longer face gaze in Williams syndrome. The new study says that boost disappears when faces are inverted.
Cashon et al. (2013) found toddlers with Williams syndrome process only upright faces holistically. Together the papers pin the effect on configural processing, not faces in general.
McCarron et al. (2013) reported some people with Williams syndrome actually look less at faces. The 2016 data add a boundary rule: inversion wipes out the usual increase, explaining part of that heterogeneity.
Why it matters
When you assess social attention, present faces upright to see the true Williams syndrome profile. Inverted faces give no useful difference. Use this rule to keep assessments short and clear.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) exhibit atypical attentional characteristics when viewing faces. Although atypical configural processing of faces has been reported in WS, the relative strengths of configural and local feature information to capture visual attention in WS remains unclear. We previously demonstrated that attentional capture by target-unrelated upright faces differs depending on what response is measured. Whereas eye movements reflected subtle atypical attentional properties at the late stage of visual search, manual responses could not capture the atypical attentional profiles towards target-unrelated upright faces in individuals with WS. Here we used the same experimental paradigm to assess whether sensitivity to configural facial information is necessary for capturing attention in WS. METHODS: We measured both eye movements and manual responses from 17 individuals with WS and 34 typically developing children and adults while they were actively involved in a visual search task with an inverted face distractor. Task measures (reaction time and performance accuracy) and gaze behaviour (initial direction of attention and fixation duration) were analysed for each stimulus. RESULTS: When the target and the inverted face were displayed in the same search array, reaction times and accuracies in individuals with WS showed similar tendencies as typical controls. Analysis of task and gaze measures revealed that attentional orienting towards inverted faces was not atypical. CONCLUSION: Although individuals with WS exhibited atypical gaze behaviour towards upright faces in our previous study, this unusual behaviour disappears if the faces are upside down. These findings suggest that local feature information alone (e.g. eyes) does not contribute to the heightened attention to faces, but configural information appears necessary for drawing attention to faces in individuals with WS, at least in the current experimental paradigm.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2016 · doi:10.1111/jir.12318