How do people with Williams syndrome perceive face-like patterns?
Despite their strong social drive, individuals with Williams syndrome struggle to recognize face-like patterns made from food arrangements compared to typically developing peers.
Source
Social Cognition in Williams Syndrome: Face Tuning
What they did
Researchers compared 20 individuals with Williams syndrome to 20 typically developing control participants matched for age and gender. Participants completed the Face-n-Food task, viewing 10 images composed of food items arranged in patterns that ranged from weakly to strongly resembling a face. On each image, participants spontaneously described what they saw, and their answers were coded for whether they recognized a face.
What they found
Typically developing controls recognized a face much earlier in the sequence, on average at image 3.95, while individuals with Williams syndrome did not see a face until image 8.18 on average. Overall, the Williams syndrome group recognized faces in only 22% of the images, compared to 62% for the control group. Three of the 20 individuals with Williams syndrome failed to recognize a face even in the most obvious, final image.
The limits
What it doesn't show
This study cannot explain the exact neural or cognitive mechanism driving this deficit, such as whether it stems from a preference for processing local details over a whole image. The small sample size of 20 participants per group limits the generalizability of the findings to all individuals with Williams syndrome. Additionally, the study does not test how these individuals process real human faces, which may engage different social and cognitive pathways than food-based illusions.
Key terms
- Williams syndrome
- A genetic neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by a hypersocial personality, cognitive challenges, and atypical visual processing.
- Face-n-Food task
- An experimental paradigm using food arrangements that resemble human faces to test spontaneous face recognition.
- Arcimboldo style
- A style of art, named after painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, where portraits are composed entirely of inanimate objects like fruits, vegetables, or flowers.
- Holistic processing
- A cognitive strategy where an object, such as a face, is perceived as a single integrated whole rather than a collection of individual features.
- Featural encoding
- A visual processing strategy that focuses on individual elements or details rather than integrating them into a unified whole.
- Gestalt
- An organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its individual sensory parts.
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Quiz yourself
What is the main finding regarding face tuning in Williams syndrome (WS) using the Face-n-Food task?
Common questions
Why is it surprising that individuals with Williams syndrome struggled with this task?
People with Williams syndrome typically show a strong fascination with human faces and an intense desire for social interaction, so a severe deficit in recognizing face-like patterns is unexpected.
Does this mean people with Williams syndrome cannot recognize actual human faces?
No, individuals with Williams syndrome often score in the normal range on standard tests using real human faces, but they may use different, feature-by-feature processing strategies to do so.
What are Arcimboldo-style images?
These are pictures inspired by the Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo, where everyday items like fruits, vegetables, or books are arranged to look like a human face.
How did the researchers rule out general visual or intellectual difficulties as the cause?
The researchers administered separate standardized tests for non-verbal reasoning and visual perception and found no correlation between those scores and performance on the food-face task.
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