It has been hypothesized that neural synchrony underlies perceptual coherence. The hypothesis of loss of central perceptual coherence has been proposed to be at the origin of abnormal cognition in autism spectrum disorders and Williams syndrome, a neurodevelopmental disorder linked with autism, and a clearcut model for impaired central coherence. We took advantage of this model of impaired holistic processing to test the hypothesis that loss of neural synchrony plays a separable role in visual integration using EEG and a set of experimental tasks requiring coherent integration of local elements leading to 3-D face perception. A profound reorganization of brain activity was identified. Neural synchrony was reduced across stimulus conditions, and this was associated with increased amplitude modulation at 25–45 Hz. This combination of a dramatic loss of synchrony despite increased oscillatory activity is strong evidence that synchrony underlies central coherence. This is the first time, to our knowledge, that dissociation between amplitude and synchrony is reported in a human model of impaired perceptual coherence, suggesting that loss of phase coherence is more directly related to disruption of holistic perception.

Object and depth perception from motion cues involves the recruitment of visual dorsal stream brain areas. In 3-D structure-from-motion (SFM) perception, motion and depth information are first extracted in this visual stream to allow object categorization, which is in turn mediated by the ventral visual stream. Such interplay justifies the use of SFM paradigms to understand dorsal–ventral integration of visual information. The nature of such processing is particularly interesting to be investigated in a neurological model of cognitive dissociation between dorsal (impaired) and ventral stream (relatively preserved) processing, Williams syndrome (WS). In the current fMRI study, we assessed dorsal versus ventral stream processing by using a performance-matched 3-D SFM object categorization task. We found evidence for substantial reorganization of the dorsal stream in WS as assessed by whole-brain ANOVA random effects analysis, with subtle differences in ventral activation. Dorsal reorganization was expressed by larger medial recruitment in WS (cuneus, precuneus, and retrosplenial cortex) in contrast with controls, which showed the expected dorsolateral pattern (caudal intraparietal sulcus and lateral occipital cortex). In summary, we found a substantial reorganization of dorsal stream regions in WS in response to simple visual categories and 3-D SFM perception, with less affected ventral stream. Our results corroborate the existence of a medial dorsal pathway that provides the substrate for information rerouting and reorganization in the presence of lateral dorsal stream vulnerability. This interpretation is consistent with recent findings suggesting parallel routing of information in medial and lateral parts of dorsal stream.