Looking and thinking: how individuals with Williams syndrome make judgements about mental states.
Williams syndrome does not guarantee prolonged face gaze—expect heterogeneity and assess individual attention patterns before designing social skills interventions.
01Research in Context
What this study did
McCarron et al. (2013) watched how people with Williams syndrome looked at faces while they guessed mental states.
They used eye-tracking to measure where each person looked on photos of eyes.
The team compared the WS group to same-age peers without the syndrome.
What they found
The WS group looked less at faces and made more mental-state mistakes than peers.
Longer face looking did not link to better answers, breaking the old belief that WS means strong face focus.
How this fits with other research
Two 2009 papers saw the opposite. Cramm et al. (2009) and Casey et al. (2009) both reported longer face gaze in WS.
The clash fades when you note the 2009 tasks used movies or simple detection, not mental-state reading.
Robertson et al. (2013), using the same 2013 lab, adds that high anxiety in WS cuts eye gaze to scary faces, showing why results swing.
Why it matters
Do not assume every client with Williams syndrome will stare at faces. Run quick eye-tracking or watch where they look during table work. If gaze is low, teach mental-state skills with extra prompts, not more face pictures. Check anxiety levels too; calming first can bring gaze back.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Individuals with the neuro-developmental disorder Williams syndrome (WS) are characterised by a combination of features which makes this group vulnerable socially, including mild-moderate cognitive difficulties, pro-social drive, and indiscriminate trust. The purpose of this study was to explore a key socio-communicative skill in individuals with WS, namely, mental state recognition abilities. We explored this skill in a detailed way by looking at how well individuals with WS recognise complex everyday mental states, and how they allocate their attention while making these judgements. Participants with WS were matched to two typically developing groups for comparison purposes, a verbal ability matched group and a chronological age matched group. While eye movements were recorded, participants were shown displays of eight different mental states in static and dynamic form, and they performed a forced-choice judgement on the mental state. Mental states were easier to recognise in dynamic form rather than static form. Mental state recognition ability for individuals with WS was poorer than expected by their chronological age, and at the level expected by their verbal ability. However, the pattern of mental state recognition for participants with WS varied according to mental state, and we found some interesting links between ease/difficulty recognising some mental states (worried/do not trust) and the classic behavioural profile associated with WS (high anxiety/indiscriminate trust). Furthermore, eye tracking data revealed that participants with WS allocated their attention atypically, with less time spent attending the information from the face regions. This challenges the widely held understanding of WS being associated with prolonged face and eye gaze, and indicates that there is more heterogeneity within this disorder in terms of socio-perception than previous reports would suggest.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.09.026