Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Williams syndrome (WS) is a genetic developmental disorder characterized by severe spatial impairments andstructural and functional abnormalities in the hippocampus (Meyer-Lindenburg et al., 2006). Although the spatial deficit iswell-documented, we know little about other deficits that would be predicted by the hippocampal abnormalities. Here, weexamine episodic memory (i.e. memory for personally experienced events in a spatio-temporal context, Tulving, 1983), askingpeople with WS to recount past personal events. We use an interview method developed for patients (Levine et al., 2002) andtypically developing children (Willoughby et al., 2012). People with WS recounted significantly fewer episodic details thanage-matched controls. Importantly however, they offered just as many semantic details (reflecting general world knowledge),indicating that global factors (e.g., verbal skill or IQ) cannot account for these results. Our work identifies a specific cognitivedeficit in WS and further highlights the critical involvement of the hippocampus in episodic memory.