Expressive drawing ability in children with fragile x syndrome (FXS) and autism (ASD)

Growing number of studies demonstrate that children diagnosed with FXS, with and without autism, and children diagnosed with autism alone differ in subtle but fundamental and clinically important ways across developmental time and across behavioural and cognitive domains:
- Eye gaze and social relationships
- Theory of mind
- Speech and language

Research has indicated cross syndrome disparities within hierarchical visuo-spatial processing as well as differences between syndromes and the typical population.

No previous studies have directly compared this in relation to expressive drawing ability in ASD and FXS but separate studies have shown:-
- Jolley et al. 2013 found that drawings of individuals with autism did not include fewer people but included less social scenes than MA matched controls.
- Sheppard et al (2007) found that ASD individuals less affected by dimensionality of drawings than non affected individuals but equally as affected by the meaningfulness of the stimuli.
- Crowe & Hay (1990); Freund & Reiss (1991) found visuo motor impairments in tasks that involved drawing in individuals with FXS.
- Cornish et al. (1998,1999) found that visuo-construction abilities in FXS were dependant on stimuli type and that performance in the draw-a-person task is similar to MA matched controls.

However, it is still unclear how children with a comorbid diagnosis of FXS and autism, and children with FXS perform on expressive drawings and how that compares to children with ASD.