Contextual integration of causal coherence in people with Williams syndrome

Insights into Oral and Written Competencies in Neurodevelopmental Disorders

The study of language abilities offers privileged insights to access the multifaceted world of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD, henceforth), showing how particular aspects of language may be handled differently as a function of typical neuropsychological features of specific disorders [...].

Computerized False Belief Tasks Impact Mentalizing Ability in People with Williams Syndrome

People with Williams syndrome (WS) are characterized by hyper sociability, fluency in languages, and advantageous face-processing skills, leading to the proposal of a social module. Previous studies on the mentalizing abilities of people with WS using two-dimensional pictures, including normal-like, delayed, and deviant behaviors, have yielded mixed results. Thus, this study examined the mentalizing ability of people with WS through structured computerized animations of false belief tasks to investigate whether inferences about other people's minds can be improved in this population. Participants were shown animations containing unexpected location and content changes. After viewing each animation, participants had to answer four types of questions relating to character identification, reality, memory, and false belief. Their responses were recorded and analyzed. A comprehension of false belief was observed in 4-year-old healthy children, whereas children with WS showed enhanced comprehension of false belief (until they attained a chronological age [CA] of 5.9 years), suggesting an improvement in the theory of mind resulting from viewing structured computerized animations. This age is earlier than that reported by previous studies for using theory of mind to pass false belief tests (CA 9 years), even challenging the age at which individuals failed to pass the tests (CA 17.11 years). Structured computerized animations enhanced the mentalizing ability of people with WS to a certain extent. Compared to the typically developing controls, people with WS presented with a lower developmental level in processing false belief tasks. This study has educational implications for the development of computerized social skills interventions for people with WS.

Emotion Priming in People with Williams Syndrome

Emotion categories configure the basic semantic knowledge of the human cognitive structure. Previous studies with people with Williams syndrome (WS) investigated their ability to process basic emotions and the dimensions of emotional valences. However, little is known about the categorization of emotions from the subordinate perspective of lexical words in people with WS. In this study, emotion priming was used as the research paradigm. Three types of emotional valence were used as stimuli: positive, neutral, and negative. Each emotional valence was used as a prime matched to a target in one of these same three types of emotional valence. All participants were asked to judge whether the prime and the target were matched in their emotional valence. People with WS (n = 14, 11M/3F, CA = 10.49, and MA = 6.57) showed priming patterns for emotion valences like those of the typically developing controls. When positive primes were presented, accuracy was higher for positive and negative targets than neutral targets. When neutral primes were presented, accuracy was highest for negative targets. When negative primes were presented, accuracy was the lowest for negative targets. All participants showed high priming accuracy for positive emotions; however, they confused neutral with positive targets. A negative priming effect was observed when negative primes preceded negative targets. Considering previous findings that people with WS show developmental delays in the basic emotions of anger and surprise, this study concludes that people with WS responded least accurately to the classification of emotional valence. The findings regarding the categorization of emotions in people with WS not only advance our understanding of their emotion knowledge and socioemotional cognition but also confirm the superficial enrichment of lexical semantics with weak conceptual change in people with WS. This weakness may result in impaired contextual integration in people with WS.

Contextual effects on the figurative processing of nouns and verbs in people with Williams syndrome

BACKGROUND

People with Williams syndrome (WS) are relatively proficient with lexical semantics; however, their contextual integration ability is impaired. Few studies have examined the cause of this deficiency.

AIMS

This study aimed to examine how people with WS process the integration of lexical words into contexts and determine whether this processing differs across syntactic categories.

METHODS AND PROCEDURES

Cross-modal tasks with pictures and aurally presented sentences were employed. The semantic appropriateness of target word meanings represented by pictures with context were determined.

OUTCOMES AND RESULTS

People with WS responded to the figurative and literal nouns as appropriate interpretations significantly less often than the chronological age (CA)-matched controls; however, they responded to the literal verbs significantly more often than the mental age (MA)-matched controls. Furthermore, our findings suggest that people with WS displayed weaker contextual integration and asymmetric processing of nouns and verbs.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

People with WS were not at the same lexical semantic knowledge developmental level as the CA controls and differed from the MA controls. They used less contextual information when processing syntactic categories compared to the typically developing controls. These might lead to the impaired integration of words into contexts. These findings confirm the neuroconstructivism theory.

Investigating basic emotion knowledge of people with Williams syndrome

BACKGROUND

Emotional recognition is a key aspect of mentalizing other people's minds. People with Williams syndrome (WS) are reported to be hypersocial and empathetic; however, few studies have investigated their emotion processing ability.

AIMS

This study aimed to examine emotion knowledge in people with WS and to further understand their emotion-related mentalizing ability.

METHODS AND PROCEDURES

Six basic emotions (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise) were tested by narrating scenarios targeting specific emotions. Participants with WS (n = 16, 8F/8 M, CA = 8.46, MA = 5.27) listened to each scenario and pointed to an emoticon displayed on a card. Correct percentages of each target emotion and replacement by other emotions were analyzed. Comparison groups comprised mental age-matched controls (n = 16, 8F/8 M, CA = 5.26) and chronological age-matched controls (n = 16, 8 F/8 M, CA = 8.31), sixth graders (n = 20, 10F/10M, CA = 12.04), and college students (n = 20, 10F/10M, CA = 20.03). All were Chinese-speaking participants with right handedness.

OUTCOMES AND RESULTS

People with WS were delayed compared to the mental age-matched group but differed from the chronological age-matched group in emotion processing. The 6th graders showed different patterns from college students, suggesting that development of emotion processing takes time.

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

These findings suggest (1) a gap in the maturation of emotion knowledge between people with WS and typically developing controls, (2) a nonequivalent chronological emotion-related mentalizing ability in people with WS, and (3) developmental changes in emotion processing from childhood to adulthood.

Understanding emotional language through events and words in people with Williams syndrome

Previous studies have mainly examined emotion recognition through face processing in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS). Contextual integration is an automatic and basic comprehension ability emerged from distinct modalities. This ability requires sensation to global configuration and local elements. However, neurodevelopmental disorders are characterized by local-focusing and global-ignoring in visuospatial perception. This causes cognitive atypicality as compared to typical development, including atypical face processing and emotion recognition. These impairments might result in deficits in theory of mind and social cognition. People with WS demonstrate impaired false-belief attribution, which was reported to be improved with emotional cues. Yet, no previous study has examined knowledge of emotional language in people with WS, which might be one of the factors affecting the development of the theory of mind in people with WS. In the present study, we examined knowledge of emotional language in people with WS by testing three emotions: positive, negative, and neutral. Participants were asked to press buttons indexing emotions in reaction to auditory targets. In the emotional event study, people with WS demonstrated responses to positive events in the normal range, delayed responses to negative events, and deviant responses to neutral events. In the emotion word study, people with WS showed the lowest accuracy and longest reaction times for neutral words. These findings indicated asymmetrical and atypical knowledge of emotional language in people with WS, confirming that knowledge of emotional expressions influences the development of the theory of mind and social cognition.

Modality effect on contextual integration in people with Williams syndrome

In this study meaningful social stimuli were used as probes in a task requiring the judgment of semantic appropriateness to investigate contextual integration ability to test the ability of people with Williams syndrome (WS) to integrate information, as opposed to the use of meaningless syllables in audiovisual studies (the McGurk effect). Participants were presented with background auditory primes followed by targets that were either congruent or incongruent with the prime. Two modes of target were presented: a visual target (AV task) or an auditory target (AA task). Participants were asked to respond yes to contextually appropriate pairs and no to those that were contextually inappropriate. The congruency effect was measured as an index of successful central coherence. Similar to normally developing controls, people with WS showed shorter response latencies and greater accuracy in recognizing congruent pairs compared with incongruent pairs. Their performance did not differ from that of controls matched by mental age, but was inferior to that of controls matched by chronological age. The results revealed generalized contextual integration for auditory primes in both tasks, consistent with previous studies using visual presentation of social-related stimuli in people with WS (Hsu, 2013a, 2013c). Further demonstration of the presence of a modality effect on contextual coherence implies that cross-modal learning may be advantageous compared with unimodal learning.

Cross-modal contextual coherence of information integration in people with Williams syndrome

This study aimed to explore the generalization of contextual integration from within-modality (visual-visual) to cross-modal (visual-auditory) processing in people with Williams syndrome (WS), and to clarify whether the concreteness or social relatedness of stimuli contributed to contextual coherence using pictures. Contextual coherence was evaluated in accordance with context-appropriateness between visual backgrounds and auditory targets. The ability to judge appropriateness was defined as contextual integration ability, which leads to contextual coherence. The congruent conditions (e.g., a swimming pool vs. swimming goggles) and incongruent conditions (e.g., a movie theater vs. a hot-pot) were presented to people with WS and to typical controls. The results revealed a congruency effect in people with WS similar to that found in the typical controls matched by mental age. The generalization of contextual integration ability across modalities was demonstrated by comparing the findings on cross-modal presentation with those obtained in a within-modality visual study of people with WS. It was further clarified that the social relatedness of stimuli, and not concreteness, led to contextual coherence among people with WS.