What and why understanding in autism spectrum disorders and williams syndrome: similarities and differences.
Kids with autism can name what they see but still need help seeing why.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Sparaci et al. (2014) showed short action videos to three groups: kids with autism, kids with Williams syndrome, and mental-age matched peers.
They asked two kinds of questions: “What is the person doing?” and “Why are they doing it?”
This let them check if the children could name the action and also read the hidden intention.
What they found
Children with autism could name the action but struggled to explain the intention.
Children with Williams syndrome had trouble with both naming and intention.
Each syndrome showed its own pattern, so a single test can miss the difference.
How this fits with other research
Hou et al. (2024) saw the same split in a give-and-take game. Kids with autism predicted handing over a toy but could not explain the sharing reason.
Hou et al. (2023) found a similar gap in joint intention tasks. Eye-tracking showed the children watched but still missed the shared goal.
Weiss et al. (2021) extended the autism-vs-Williams comparison to music memory. Both groups remembered sung melodies better than instrumental ones, showing the cross-syndrome method works in other domains too.
Why it matters
When you test social skills, ask both “what” and “why” questions. A child who can label an action may still need help grasping the purpose. Use the pattern to pick targets: work on intention reading for autism, and both naming and intention for Williams syndrome.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and children with Williams syndrome (WS) show divergent social phenotypes, but also several similarities in their socio-cognitive deficits. Cross-syndrome direct comparisons could lead to a better understanding of mechanisms that determine deficits in social cognition in the two syndromes. A fundamental factor for social cognition is the ability to understand and predict others' actions (e.g. what action is being done and why it is being done when observing a goal-related act). Here we compared the understanding of others' actions in children with ASD, WS and in children with typical development. Comprehension of what motor act was being done and of why it was being done was assessed with or without contextual cueing using a computer-based task. The results showed that what understanding was impaired in the WS group, but not in the ASD group, which showed mental-age appropriate performance. Why understanding was impaired in both experimental groups. Autism Res 2014, 7: 421-432. © 2014 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2014 · doi:10.1002/aur.1370