Visual-motor integration, visual perception and motor coordination in a population with Williams syndrome and in typically developing children.
Williams syndrome locks visual-motor skills at a young learners level for life, so teach usable work-arounds early.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team gave the Beery-VMI to 24 people with Williams syndrome. Ages ranged from 6 to 41.
They also tested the kids without disabilities. Each WS participant was matched to a young learners control.
What they found
Every person with Williams syndrome scored like a young learners. No one got better with age.
The gap stayed the same whether the task was drawing, seeing, or moving.
How this fits with other research
Lemons et al. (2015) studied the same WS group one year earlier. They saw that better VMI went hand in hand with better daily skills. The new paper shows why progress stops: the skill itself freezes at age 5.
Davidson et al. (2014) found kids with NF1 also lag on VMI, but their scores slowly improve. The WS plateau is sharper and permanent.
Dionne et al. (2024) saw math problems in kids with DCD who had low VMI. The WS data warn that without VMI growth, math and other skills may stay stuck too.
Why it matters
If you work with Williams syndrome, do not wait for visual-motor skills to catch up. Target them directly and early. Use short, daily drawing or tracing drills. Track data weekly. When progress flatlines, shift goals to using the young learners level skill in real tasks like typing, stamping, or voice-to-text. Share the plateau data with parents so they plan for long-term support.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Williams syndrome (WS) is characterised by severe deficits in visual-spatial abilities in contrast to relatively well-developed language abilities. There is very limited knowledge about visual-motor integration (VMI) in people with WS. METHOD: Twenty-six participants with WS aged 6 to 41 years were assessed with all three tests of the Beery-VMI test, namely the VMI test, the visual perception test (VP) and the motor coordination test (MC). Their results were compared with those of 154 typically developing children (TD) aged 4 to 12. RESULTS: No influence of age on the three tested abilities was found amongst the participants with WS in comparison with the TD children. The participants with WS scored similarly to the 5-year-old TD children in all three tasks; their scores on the VMI correlated with the results on the VP and MC tests, which were similar to those of the TD children. Finally, the scores on the non-verbal intelligence test (Raven Coloured Progressive Matrices) were highly predictive of the scores in the VMI and VP tests and partially explain the variance in the MC scores. CONCLUSIONS: The present study is the first to use all three tasks of the Beery-VMI test. For the TD children, the performances on the three subtests did not show the same developmental trajectory. In contrast, the participants with WS did not show the same developmental trajectory. The participants with WS exhibited poor performances on all tasks with scores comparable with the 5-year-old TD children. As high correlations between these abilities were observed, improving VP and MC could help the development of VMI, which in turn could improve visual-spatial abilities in individuals with WS.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2016 · doi:10.1111/jir.12328