Tracey Williams

Children's Hospital at Westmead · Department of Rehabilitation

Objectives: To describe the severity and clinical spectrum of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in children during the 2021 New South Wales outbreak of the Delta variant of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). Design, setting: Prospective cohort study in three metropolitan Sydney local health districts, 1 June - 31...

Objective(s): To describe the severity and clinical spectrum of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Australian children during the 2021 Delta outbreak. Design, Setting & Participants: A prospective cohort study of children <16 years with a positive SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid test cared for by the Sydney Children's Hospital Network (SCHN) virtual and inpatient med...

Acute necrotizing encephalopathy (ANE) is a rare form of acute encephalopathy, predominantly occurring in childhood, which has a typical radiological phenotype including bilateral, symmetrical, diffusion-restricted lesions of the thalami; posterior putamen; cerebellum; and brainstem. To date, no study has systematically examined the long-term cogni...

Aim To examine visual attention to faces within social scenes in children with neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) and typically developing peers. Method Using eye‐tracking technology we investigated the time taken to fixate on a face and the percentage of time spent attending to faces relative to the rest of the screen within social scenes in 24 child...

The long-term neurocognitive prognosis of childhood onset acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) is unclear. This review and quantitative synthesis of the available literature examined whether there are long-term impacts of childhood ADEM on neurocognitive functioning. A search of online databases (MEDLINE, EMBASE, EBSCO CINAHL, PsycINFO and t...

Objective: This study aimed to investigate face scan paths and face perception abilities in children with Neurofibromatosis Type 1 (NF1) and how these might relate to emotion recognition abilities in this population. Method: The authors investigated facial emotion recognition, face scan paths, and face perception in 29 children with NF1 compared...

Inflammatory basal ganglia encephalitis (BGE) is a rare but distinct entity of putative autoimmune aetiology, with specific basal ganglia inflammation and acute movement disorders. Unlike most brain injuries, BGE is a radiologically pure basal ganglia syndrome. The current study systematically describes the neuropsychological outcomes of four paedi...

Explicit tests of social cognition have revealed pervasive deficits in schizophrenia. Less is known of automatic social cognition in schizophrenia. We used a spatial orienting task to investigate automatic shifts of attention cued by another person’s eye-gaze in 29 patients and 28 controls. Central photographic images of a face with eyes shifted le...

Background: Attention deficits are common after acquired brain injury (ABI) and adversely impact academic, vocational and social outcomes. The role of cognitive interventions in post-ABI attention rehabilitation remains unclear. Objective: To evaluate effectiveness of cognitive interventions in treating attention deficits following ABI and to ex...

Extensive research has examined attentional bias for threat in anxious adults and school-aged children but it is unclear when this anxiety-related bias is first established. This study uses eyetracking technology to assess attentional bias in a sample of 83 children aged 3 or 4 years. Of these, 37 (19 female) met criteria for an anxiety disorder an...

Abstract Evidence is emerging that individuals with Fragile X syndrome (FXS) display emotion recognition deficits, which may contribute to their significant social difficulties. The current study investigated the emotion recognition abilities, and social approachability judgments, of FXS individuals when processing emotional stimuli. Relative to ch...

Fragile X syndrome (FXS) and Williams syndrome (WS) are both genetic disorders which present with similar cognitive-behavioral problems, but distinct social phenotypes. Despite these social differences both syndromes display poor social relations which may result from abnormal social processing. This study aimed to manipulate the location of social...