Psychology and Human Development, University College London, Institute of Education London, UK ; Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, School of Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London London, UK.
Psychology and Human Development, University College London, Institute of Education London, UK.
Front Psychol. 2015 Feb 25;6:216. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00216. eCollection 2015.
Visuospatial difficulties in Williams syndrome (WS) are well documented. Recently, research has shown that spatial difficulties in WS extend to large-scale space, particularly in coding space using an allocentric frame of reference. Typically developing (TD) children and adults predominantly rely on the use of a sequential egocentric strategy to navigate a large-scale route (retracing a sequence of left-right body turns). The aim of this study was to examine whether individuals with WS are able to employ a sequential egocentric strategy to guide learning and the retracing of a route. Forty-eight TD children, aged 5, 7, and 9 years and 18 participants with WS were examined on their ability to learn and retrace routes in two (6-turn) virtual environment mazes (with and without landmarks). The ability to successfully retrace a route following the removal of landmarks (use of sequential egocentric coding) was also examined. Although in line with TD 5-year-olds when learning a route with landmarks, individuals with WS showed significantly greater detriment when these landmarks were removed, relative to all TD groups. Moreover, the WS group made significantly more errors than all TD groups when learning a route that never contained landmarks. On a perceptual view-matching task, results revealed a high level of performance across groups, indicative of an ability to use this visual information to potentially aid navigation. These findings suggest that individuals with WS rely on landmarks to a greater extent than TD children, both for learning a route and for retracing a recently learned route. TD children, but not individuals with WS, were able to fall back on the use of a sequential egocentric strategy to navigate when landmarks were not present. Only TD children therefore coded sequential route information simultaneously with landmark information. The results are discussed in relation to known atypical cortical development and perceptual-matching abilities in WS.
威廉姆斯综合征（WS）患者存在明显的视空间障碍。最近的研究表明，WS 患者的空间困难延伸到了大范围的空间，尤其是在使用以自我为中心的参照系来编码空间的情况下。典型发展（TD）的儿童和成年人主要依赖于使用顺序自我中心策略来导航大范围的路线（回溯一系列左右身体转动）。本研究旨在检验 WS 患者是否能够使用顺序自我中心策略来指导学习和路线的回溯。我们对 48 名 TD 儿童（5 岁、7 岁和 9 岁）和 18 名 WS 患者的能力进行了测试，他们要在两个（6 个转弯）虚拟环境迷宫中学习和回溯路线（有地标和没有地标）。还测试了在去除地标后（使用顺序自我中心编码）成功回溯路线的能力。尽管在学习有地标路线时与 TD 5 岁儿童一致，但与所有 TD 组相比，当去除这些地标时，WS 患者的表现明显更差。此外，WS 组在学习从未包含地标路线时犯的错误明显多于所有 TD 组。在感知视图匹配任务中，结果显示所有组的表现水平都很高，表明他们有能力使用这种视觉信息来辅助导航。这些发现表明，WS 患者比 TD 儿童更依赖地标，无论是学习路线还是回溯最近学习的路线。TD 儿童，而不是 WS 患者，在没有地标时能够依赖顺序自我中心策略来导航。只有 TD 儿童因此同时将顺序路线信息和地标信息编码。结果与 WS 中已知的异常皮质发育和感知匹配能力相关联进行了讨论。
