Spatial Deficits in Children with Williams Syndrome

This chapter describes the severe spatial cognitive deficit exhibited by these children, and some aspects of the uneven neuropsychological profile which they exhibit. The children's scores were all the same, despite their advanced ages, and comparable only to the level of a normal child of age 4:11, thus showing uniformly severe spatial deficits in this simplified drawing task. The chapter examines interesting dissociation in the neuropsychological profite of Williams Syndrome children. The Williams Syndrome children exhibit major deficits in cognitive functioning. The chapter focuses on the children's spatial cognitive deficits and the apparent dissociations between some visuospatial and visuoperceptual functioning. Despite their severe spatial cognitive deficits, the Williams Syndrome children exhibit unimpaired performance on certain visual tasks such as recognition of unfamiliar faces under different conditions of lighting and orientation. Thus Williams Syndrome appears to affect behavior, language, and learning in highly specific ways.