This blog article summarises findings from a research article documenting mentalising skills of children who live with Cornelia de Lange Syndrome and Fragile X Syndrome. You can read the full paper by Katherine Ellis, Joanna Moss, Malwina Dziwisz, Beth Jones, Christina Danai Griva, Sophie Pendered, Roisin C Perry, and Sarah J White овде. For more information on Cornelia de Lange Syndrome, click овде. 

Children living with FXS often display high levels of autism characteristics, which appear differently in each individual. ‘Mentalising’, or our ability to understand our thoughts and that of others, may explain why these differences occur. Conventionally developed tasks to evaluate mentalising skills, such as traditional explicit false belief tasks, do not accommodate the needs of people living with intellectual disabilities. 

A new study was able to assess mentalising skills of children living with FXS using a set of tasks that are more sensitive to these needs. With a sample of 34 neurotypical children, 22 children living with autism, 9 with Cornelia de Lange Syndrome and 9 with FXS, the study found that children with autism found the implicit and explicit tasks more challenging compared to neurotypical children. The sample size living with Cornelia de Lange Syndrome and FXS only struggled with explicit tasks, and displayed particular strengths in mentalising on the implicit task. The authors believe that the mentalising ability of children with FXS could be ‘masked’ in traditional explicit tasks as they concern explicit reasoning about others’ mental states and recruit language mechanisms, while implicit mentalising tasks enter an automatic, unconscious, and rapid processing of others’ mental states that does not need verbal reasoning. 

The paper calls for further research involving the following: 

1. Studies must be conducted with a larger sample of children with FXS to determine whether performance on implicit mentalizing tasks are able to distinguish between those with and without co-occurring autism.
2. More work must be done to study the relationships between implicit mentalising and social anxiety-related neurocognitive profiles.