Spatial Deficits in Williams Syndrome

Dr. James E. Hoffman - University of Delaware

Williams syndrome is a rare, genetically-based disorder resulting in mental retardation and an unusual pattern of strengths and weaknesses in cognitive abilities. Relatively preserved language capacities are paired with profound impairments in spatial ability. Barbara Landau and I are using eye tracking measures obtained during the performance of various spatial construction tasks to gain a detailed understanding of the nature of their spatial deficit and how it affects spatial language. Our initial experiments compared normal adults, mental age-matched controls and children with Williams syndrome on a task requiring subjects to arrange a set of parts to match a model. The results were presented at Psychonomics in Dallas in November of 1998.

The sequence of eye movements during solution of the puzzle provides information on the order in which information is acquired and how many "chunks" of spatial information are picked up in each fixation. On these measures, children with Williams syndrome and age-matched controls look similar. However, Williams syndrome children make many more errors and often have trouble correcting them. You can appreciate some of these difficulties by watching a playback of the eye movements and block placement during puzzle solution. The following demonstration presents a playback of four trials from the experiment. The first two are Williams subjects and the last two are mental age-matched controls. Hint: You should set your browser for full screen viewing. Controls on the screen allow you to pause the presentation, control the speed of the playback, etc.


Click here for sample playback of eye movements.

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For additional information about Williams syndrome, please send an e-mail to hlenhoff@uci.edu.

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Copyright © 2002 Williams Syndrome Foundation
Last modified: April 15, 2007