Annette Karmiloff-Smith CBE FBA FMedSci (1938–2016) was a professorial research fellow at the Developmental Neurocognition Lab at Birkbeck, University of London.
Before moving to Birbeck, she was Head of the Neurocognitive Development Unit at Institute of Child Health, University College, London.
This rare syndrome was originally thought to manifest itself as abnormally low IQ, accompanied by "normal" ability to process social cues.
In a series of papers (e.g.[7]), Karmiloff-Smith and colleagues discovered that impairments in Williams syndrome are far more widespread than had previously been appreciated.
Karmiloff-Smith authored a number of books and academic articles, most notably Beyond Modularity[6] in 1992 and Rethinking Innateness[9] with Jeffrey Elman, Mark Johnson, Elizabeth Bates, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett in 1996.