Self-Regulation and Academic Learning in Preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Links to School Engagement and Levels of Autism Characteristics.

Yanru et al. (2025) tried the NIHTB-CB executive-function tasks on the preschoolers with Williams syndrome. The kids were 4-6 years old and all had mild to moderate intellectual disability.

The team gave each child the full battery on a tablet. They timed how long kids took and scored each task with age-corrected norms.

Every child could tap the screen and finish the games. That shows the tablet tasks are doable in WS.

But when scores were set against typical young learners, most kids hit the floor. Their scores clustered at the lowest possible point, so the test could not show small differences in skill.

Valeri et al. (2020) saw the opposite in able preschoolers with ASD. Those kids could take the BAFE EF battery and real differences showed up. The two studies do not clash—they just test different groups. Yanru’s kids all had ID; Giovanni’s did not.

Coolican et al. (2008) ran a case series like Yanru’s, but with the SB5 IQ test in ASD. They also warned that short batteries can misread ability when scores bunch at the bottom.

Hsu (2013) found people with WS can integrate picture context, only slower. Yanru’s floor effects do not deny that skill—they just mean the NIHTB-CB tasks are too hard to capture it.

If you assess EF in young kids with WS, skip the NIHTB-CB for now. The floor scores will tell you nothing new. Use game-like tasks with simpler rules or drop age norms and track raw progress instead.