ABSTRACT
One of the dramatic aspects of the behavioral profiles in autism, Turner, and Williams syndromes is that glaring deficits in one cognitive domain coexist with remarkable performance in another. The dissociation of capacity can be striking, as for instance in the capacity of Williams syndrome children to recognize faces and objects in noncanonical views although failing utterly to copy the simplest pictures of ordinary items (Bellugi, Klima, & Sipple, 1989). Understanding of how cerebral cortex is organized both anatomically and functionally can aid in interpreting the apparent contradictions on behavioral capacity and perhaps shed light on the etiology of disorders by identifying the structures, systems, circuits, and perhaps cell classes involved in a particular condition. Such information would lead to theories of why a particular subset of structures is more vulnerable than others to a genetic or epigenetic event.
