THERE A SOCIAL MODULE - LANGUAGE, FACE PROCESSING, AND THEORY OF MINDIN INDIVIDUALS WITH WILLIAMS-SYNDROME

Many species can respond to the behavior of their conspecifics. Human children, and perhaps some nonhuman primates, also have the capacity t o respond to the mental states of their conspecifics, i.e., they have a ''theory of mind.'' On the basis of previous research on the theory- of-mind impairment in people with autism, together with animal models of intentionality, Brothers and Ring (1992) postulated a broad cogniti ve module whose function is to build representations of other individu als. We evaluate the details of this hypothesis through a series of ex periments on language, face processing, and theory of mind carried out with subjects with Williams syndrome, a rare ge genetic neurodevelopm ental disorder resulting in an uneven linguisticocognitive profile. Th e results are discussed in terms of how the comparison of different ph enotypes (e.g., Williams syndrome, Down syndrome, autism, and hydrocep haly with associated myelomeningocele) can contribute both to understa nding the neuropsychology of social cognition and to current thinking about the purported modularity of the brain.