Visuospatial skills and their association with math performance in girls with fragile X or Turner syndrome

The present study was designed to assess object identification (what') and location (where') skills among girls with fragile X or Turner syndrome and girls with neither disorder. Participants completed standardized subtests of visual perception and tasks of visuospatial what and where memory. Girls with fragile X had average performance oil most object identification tasks, yet 53% failed to accurately recreate the gestalt of a design during the where memory task. Fewer than 7% of girls in the Turner or comparison group made this error. Girls with Turner syndrome had lower scores and longer response times on object perception tasks and had poorer recall of location for internal features of the design oil the where memory task, relative to girls in the comparison or fragile X group. When limiting analyses to IQ-matched samples, correlations between math and visual perception tasks emerged, but only for girls with fragile X. These results reflect important differences between two cognitive phenotypes and have implications for the role of visuospatial processing in early math performance.