Baron-Cohen

• background


  • the triad of impairment in autism: social communication, social interactions and social imagination
  • Baron-Cohen argues that theory of mind (the ability to infer what another person is thinking or feeling and recognise other people have different thoughts) is the key difficulty of people with autism
• aims


  • to develop another advanced test for autism on theory of mind
• sample


  • 16 people with high functioning autism or Aspergers, all of normal intelligence, mean age of 28.6
  • 50 neurotypical adults, all of normal intelligence, mean age of 30, all from Cambridge
  • 10 adults with Tourette syndrome, normal IQ range, mean age of 27.7
  • these other groups were included as a control group, to establish a 'normal' level of performance on the eyes task and to compare the results of those with autism to another disorder
• procedure


  participants were tested on four tasks:

  • the eyes: shown 25 photographs of the eye region of a person's face, and had to pick between 2 mental state terms of opposites
  • strange stories: participants being presented with two examples of each 12 stories including Lie, Joke, Figure of Speech, Irony. a character says something untrue, participant asked to explain why
  • gender recognition: looking at the same set of eyes, identifying the gender of the person
  • basic emotion recognition: participants shown photographs of whole faces and identified six basic emotions
• results


  • adults with autism scored lowest on the eyes task
  • adults with autism also performed worse that both 'normal' participants and the Tourette's syndrome group on the strange stories task
  • but they did not show any differences in performance on either of the control tasks
• conclusions


  • adults with autism have subtle deficits in their 'mindreading' abilities
  • within the 'normal' population, adult females are significantly better than adult males at mindreading