Social Information Processing in Young People With Mild Level of Intellectual Development Disorder or Borderline Intellectual Functioning: Relationship With Real-World Expression of Executive Function Problems.

Raspail et al. (2025) watched 60 teens with mild ID or borderline IQ while they solved social puzzles on a computer. The kids saw short clips of peer conflicts and had to pick what each actor felt and wanted.

At the same time the team ran quick EF checks: a Stroop color test for inhibition, a digit-span for working memory, and a card sort for shifting. No teaching happened; the goal was to see which EF scores lined up with social slip-ups.

Kids who scored worse on the Stroop made twice as many encoding errors. They missed facial cues or misread body language in the clips.

When teens blamed the actor for "trying to be mean," their inhibition and working-memory scores dropped further. Benign views did not tax the system. Hostile intent soaked up the brain power they needed to stay on task.

Ramos-Cabo et al. (2021) showed that teens with ID cave to outside opinions faster than typical peers. Kaëlig adds the why: weak inhibition lets outside noise in during the first place, so encoding is already warped.

Yaniv et al. (2017) found pure response-inhibition holes in adults with Tourette syndrome. The same hole now shows up in mild ID, linking it to social bias rather than tics.

Prigge et al. (2013) tied induced echolalia to poor inhibitory control in autism. Kaëlig widens the lens—poor inhibition also feeds hostile intent bias, a different social misfire but the same EF leak.

If a teen misreads peers as "mean," check Stroop-like inhibition first. A five-minute color-naming probe can flag kids who will likely distort social cues. Slot them into stop-and-think drills before social-skills training; reducing the EF load makes room for accurate encoding and kinder attributions.