NETS, Scuola universitaria superiore IUSS, Pavia, Italy.
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Unit, Department of Neuroscience, Bambino Gesù Children's Hospital, Rome, Italy.
Res Dev Disabil. 2021 May;112:103917. doi: 10.1016/j.ridd.2021.103917. Epub 2021 Feb 28.
It has long been debated whether in Williams syndrome (WS) there is a preferential processing of local with respect to global forms, in contrast to the typical 'global advantage' in healthy individuals, which in WS seems to exist only for faces.
We aimed at verifying it and to assess the role of stimulus familiarity by comparing performances with faces to those with other objects using the same type of task.
A group of children and adolescents with WS and controls with typical development performed a modified version of three tasks: Mooney (with faces and/or guitars), Jane (with faces and houses) and Navon task.
Individuals with WS were able to process at a global level not only faces but also objects, although they were impaired when they had to compare or discriminate between two stimuli. All groups showed an advantage for global processing, with familiarity improving it. However, WS participants did not benefit from familiarity as much as typically developing young individuals.
Peculiar abilities for face stimuli in WS did not emerge nor did a clear facilitation related to object familiarity. These results are useful for planning effective interventions.
长期以来，人们一直在争论威廉姆斯综合征（WS）患者是否存在相对于整体形式的局部优势加工，而健康个体则存在典型的“全局优势”，这种优势似乎仅存在于面部。
我们旨在通过使用相同类型的任务将面部与其他物体的表现进行比较，来验证这一点，并评估刺激熟悉度的作用。
一组患有 WS 的儿童和青少年以及具有典型发育的对照组使用修改后的三个任务进行了测试：Mooney（有面部和/或吉他）、Jane（有面部和房屋）和 Navon 任务。
WS 个体不仅能够在全局水平上处理面部，还能够处理物体，尽管他们在比较或区分两个刺激时存在障碍。所有组都表现出全局处理的优势，熟悉度提高了这一优势。然而，WS 参与者并没有像典型的发育青少年那样从熟悉度中受益。
WS 患者没有出现对面部刺激的特殊能力，也没有出现与物体熟悉度相关的明显促进作用。这些结果有助于规划有效的干预措施。
