Baron-Cohen

• All autistic people have mind blindness- impairment of understanding mental states + appreciation of how mental stages govern behaviour
• Autistic individuals fail to develop ability to attribute mental states to other people- issues arise for communication as they cant understand what is being inferred
• Autistic spectrum devised as individuals diagnosed degree to which they are affected
• -Asperger's syndrome show same characteristics as autism but above average intelligence and show some good communication skills
• TOM deficit is not core in autism- no conclusive evidence that adults with 'high-functioning' autism or Asperger's have an intact TOM
• usual tests for TOM are challenging for 6 year olds but easy for adults
• Happe- tested adults with autism or Asperger's with strange stories and found that they had more difficulty than matched controls
• AIM- to build on Happe's research by using adult tests to asses theory of mind competence in 'high functioning' adults with autism or asperges syndrome
• Quasi/ natural experiment with independent measures design

  IV - person to have TOM deficits (autism or AS) naturally occurring + cant be manipulated

  DV- performance out of 25 on the eyes task
• ppts shown 25 black and white standardised images of the eye region of faces and asked them to make a choice between two mental state words to describe what they were thinking or feeling
• Group 1- 16 people with high functioning autism (4) or AS (12)- recruited thru advert in autistic magazine + clinical sources
• Group 2- 50 normal age matched adult panel of uni department - general population of Cambridge
• Group 3- 10 adults with Tourette's, age matched with groups 1+2 (8m, 2f)- recruited from a tertiary referral centre in London
• procedure- eyes task, strange stories+ two control tasks (gender recognition of eyes + basic recognition) presented in random order to all ppts
• gender recognition controlled for face perception + perceptual discrimination

  strange stories task validated results from eyes task
• ppts tested individually in a quiet room, in their own home, researchers clinic or lab at Cambridge
• Results: mean for adults with Tourette's (20.4) not significantly different from normal adults (20.3) both higher than Autism or AS (16.3)
• Normal females performed better than males on eyes task, (21.8/ 18.8)
• Autism/ AS group made more errors on eyes task
• gender + emotion control tasks no difference + no corelation for IQ and performance on eyes task
• Tourette's made no errors on strange stories but AS/ autism made many
• Concluded- adults with Autism/ AS possess an impaired TOM + TOM deficits are independent of general intelligence