Baron - Cohen Et Al

• Autism

  • Impairments in social interaction and communication skills
  • unusual interest patterns and stereotyped behaviours, symptoms often present form young age
• Triad of impairments

  Social Relationships - difficult forming relationships and they appear indifferent to people and take everything literal

  Social Communication - Difficulty with basic communication and letting people know how they feel and with eye contact

  Social Imagination - Difficulty with flexible though and imagining alternative outcomes, leads to anxiety if routine changes
• Theory of mind

  • Core deficit of autism - inability to form theory of mind and inability to understand other people have independent mind of their own
  • Cognitive deficit
  • Theory of mind allows individual to begin to understand other people
  • Ability to think about other peoples thoughts
• Sally - Anne Test / First order Test

  • Child presented with two dolls, sally puts marble in the basket and leaves the room.
  • Anne moves marble into her box and sally returns and the child asked 'where will sally look for the marble?'
  • A normal 4 year old - look in her own
  • A child with autism - look in Anne's box
  • Adults with autism found to pass this test
• Second order test

  • 'Where does Anne think Sally will look for her marbles, people Aspergers and a 6 year old can pass this test, however this only demonstrates adults have the theory of mind equivalent to a 6 year old.
• Strange Stories

  • Level of normal 8-9 year old
  • Key test either characters mental state - experimental or physical events control
  • Found mental task was more difficult
• Aim

  • Investigate if high functioning adults with autism / Aspergers would've been impaired on theory of mind testing 'Reading the mind in the eyes' They wanted to know if males would perform better than females
• Method

  • Experimental study
  • IV = characteristics of the participants
  • DV = performance on theory of mind task
  • Quasi experiment
  • Participants either had Tourettes - Involuntary tic, OCD, involuntary bad language, used because its similar to Aspergers and autism. They're both developmental disorders since childhood
• Participants

  1. Normal

  • 50 age matched - 25 male and 25 female. Normal intelligence and randomly selected from Cambridge

  2. Tourette

  • 10 recruited and age matched - 8 male and 2 female. Normal intelligence

  3. Autism / Aspergers

  • 16 normal intelligence - 13 male and 3 female. Recruited using adverts and self selected sampling
• Procedure

  • Eyes and strange stories task and two control tasks
  • Tested individuals in a quiet room - either at home or in a researchers clinic/lab at uni
• EYES TASK

  • photos of the eyes region of 25 male and females
  • Photos are all black and white and all same region and size
  • Picture shown for 3 seconds
  • Asked a question on mental state
  • One correct and one foil - foil was always opposite
  • Maximum score of 25
  • 'Which word best describes what they thinking or feeling? Words chosen were agreed upon
• STRANGE STORIES

  • Results of eyes task and this should correlate
  • If they performed bad on eyes they should perform bad on this task too
  • Gender recognition -Used to check whether deficits due to other factor, looking at same set of eyes in eyes task - asked to identify gender
  • Basic Emotion Recognition - Judge photo of whole face displaying basic emotion - happy, sad , angry , afraid ,disgusted , sad
• Results

  1. EYES TASK

  • Aspergers / Autism - 16.3
  • Normal adults - 20.3
  • Tourette - 20.4

  As predicted Aspergers and autism performed worse - simple guessing would get you 15

  2. Strange stories

  None with Tourettes made mistakes but people with autism and Aspergers did

  3. Control tasks

  No differences between groups
• Explanation of results

  • Core deficit in autism is lack of advanced theory of mind and can't understand mentalistic significance of eyes
• Strengths

  • Control of variables - intelligence, gender and development disorder controlled
  • Standardised as they're tested the same way with the same photo
  • Quantitative data in the eyes task - analytical test
• Weaknesses

  • Ecological validity - some tested at a lab and the eyes task is also unusual
  • Eyes task - lack validity and may not be testing theory of mind however - terms describe mental cognitive states and results mirror strange stories - concurrent validity
  • Only high functioning autistics used - can't generalise to all autistics