Background: Assessment of intelligence and executive function (EF) is common in complex neuropsychiatric practice. Although previous studies have shown that EF and intelligence are related, it is unknown whether these constructs relate to one another in a similar manner across different ability groups (mild intellectual disability, borderline…

Background: Whereas research has indicated that children with Down syndrome (DS) imitate demonstrated actions over short delays, it is presently unknown whether children with DS recall information over lengthy delays at levels comparable with typically developing (TD) children matched on developmental age. Method: In the present research, 10…

Background: Executive functioning (EF) is important for adequate behavioural functioning and crucial for explaining symptoms of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in individuals with normal intelligence, but is scarcely studied in individuals with ASD and intellectual disabilities (ID). We therefore study EF in an ID population by comparing…

Background: The ComFor study has indicated that individuals with intellectual disability (ID) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show enhanced visual local processing compared with individuals with ID only. Items of the ComFor with meaningless materials provided the best discrimination between the two samples. These results can be explained by the…

Background: It has been suggested that children with intellectual disabilities (ID) have motor problems and higher-order cognitive deficits. The aim of this study was to examine the motor skills and executive functions in school-age children with borderline and mild ID. The second aim was to investigate the relationship between the two performance…

Background: The present study was aimed at investigating working memory (WM) and executive functions capacities in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) as compared with mental-age matched typically developing (TD) children. Method: In order to serve the study goal, a sizeable battery of tasks tapping WM as well as attention, memory, planning,…

Background: Recent studies have demonstrated that individuals with Down syndrome (DS) present both central and verbal working memory deficits compared with controls matched for mental age, whereas evidence on visuospatial working memory (VSWM) has remained ambiguous. The present paper uses a battery of VSWM tasks to test the hypothesis that…

Background: Efficient memory functions are important to the development of cognitive and functional skills, allowing individuals to manipulate and store information. Theories of memory have suggested the presence of domain-specific (i.e. verbal and spatial) and general processing mechanisms across memory domains, including memory functions…

Background: Children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) and mild to borderline intellectual disability (ID) have less adaptive behaviour and more behaviour problems than children with mild to borderline ID. Social information processing appears to be an important mechanism in the explanation of the socially inadequate behaviour of children…

Background: Previous research suggested that persons with Down syndrome (DS) used a different strategy to drum than typical adults. Methods: The present study examined continuous bimanual drumming strategies in response to different instructions in 10 persons with DS, 10 mental age-matched and 10 chronological age-matched groups. The drumming task…

Background: Although the pattern of frontal electroencephalogram (EEG) asymmetry during the processing of emotion has been examined in many studies of healthy adults and typically developing infants and children, no published work has used these theoretical and methodological approaches to study emotion processing in children with Down syndrome.…

Verbal short-term memory, as measured by digit or word span, is generally impaired in individuals with Down's syndrome (DS) compared to mental age-matched controls. Moving from the working memory model, the present authors investigated the hypothesis that impairment in some of the articulatory loop sub-components is at the base of the deficient…

Three questions were asked that explored the linguistic fine-tuning hypothesis and how parents might model language: (i) do parents significantly tune to their children's productive language or non-verbal cognition during play? (ii) is the level of the linguistic tuning different in the Down syndrome (DS) population compared to a typically…