Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and Williams Syndrome (WS) are frequently characterized as mirror conditions in the socio-cognitive domain, with ASD entailing restrictive social interests and with WS exhibiting hypersociability. In this review paper, we examine in detail the strong points and deficits of people with ASD or WS in the socio-cognitive domain and show that both conditions also share some common features. Moreover, we explore the neurobiological basis of the social profile of ASD and WS and found a similar mixture of common affected areas and condition-specific impaired regions. We discuss these findings under the hypothesis of a continuum of the socio-cognitive abilities in humans.

自闭症谱系障碍 (ASD) 和威廉姆斯综合征 (WS) 经常被描述为社会认知领域的镜像条件，其中 ASD 需要限制性的社会兴趣，而 WS 则表现出超社交能力。在这篇评论文章中，我们详细研究了 ASD 或 WS 患者在社会认知领域的优势和缺陷，并表明这两种情况也有一些共同特征。此外，我们探索了 ASD 和 WS 社会特征的神经生物学基础，并发现了常见受影响区域和特定条件受损区域的类似混合。我们在人类社会认知能力连续统一体的假设下讨论这些发现。