PhD ThesisThe social profiles seen in Williams syndrome (WS) and autism (ASD) have often been
cited as mirror opposites of one another, with hyper-sociable behaviours seen in
Williams syndrome and a disinterest in social engagement evidenced in autism. Studies
investigating the social-perceptual abilities of individuals with these
neurodevelopmental disorders have found overlapping profiles, with a tendency towards
using more featural processing strategies when interpreting information from faces, and
deficits in recognising and interpreting the various facial cues that provide social
information. It is therefore likely that differences in social approach behaviours in the
two groups are driven by a more social-cognitive mechanism.
The focus of this thesis was on answering the overarching question: What meaning do
faces and socially relevant stimuli have for children with Williams syndrome and
autism? Six experiments examined the recognition, attribution, description and
understanding of emotions and social cues from faces and socially relevant scenes,
amongst WS and ASD individuals relative to their typically developing peers. It was
found that the social-perceptual profiles of individuals with the neurodevelopmental
disorders were markedly similar, with accuracy for identifying emotions being at nonverbal
mental (but not chronological) age level. A tendency towards differences
emerged in terms of the types of attribution and descriptions that individuals made, with
those with ASD focusing more on physical aspects of social and non-social stimuli
whilst individuals with WS showed more of an atypicality in the understanding of
emotions and social contexts.
The lack of any clear differentiation between individuals with ASD and WS in both the
social-perceptual and social-cognitive domains is in line with recent research pointing to
the extreme heterogeneity seen in these groups. The issue of overlaps and dissociations
within such heterogeneous groups provides the theoretical framework for this thesis