Baron-Cohen

• Background

  • Autism is a disorder that involves three areas:
  • Social communication
  • Social interaction
  • Social imagination
  • Baron-Cohen had long been interested in whether there was any 'core deficit' that was common to all people with autism and had established through the Sally-Anne test in the 1980s that 'theory of mind' is an area children show weakness in
• Aims

  • To investigate whether adults with autism still experience a deficit in 'Theory of Mind'
  • To develop a new 'advanced' way of testing theory of mind that would be appropriate for adults
• Sample

  • 16 adults with autism - recruited via an advert in the National Autsits Society's communication or contact of Baron-Cohen
  • 50 'normal' adults from Cambridge
  • 10 adults with tourettes from London as a control group for autism as both are childhood-onset disorders
• Procedure 1

  • Participants took the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' task
  • Shown 25 pairs of eye and had to say which of the two semantically opposite words/phrase that best described what the person was thinking or feeling
• Procedure 2

  • The 'eyes task' was a new theory of mind developed for adults
  • To help confirm it was Theory of Mind he was testing he also gave the participants the 'Strange Story Task' - this had already been validated by Theory of Mind, so if scores were similar, this would presumably be because they are measuring the same concept
  • However the strange story task typically for children aged 8-9 so they needed a new more advanced one
• Procedure3

  • Participants were also asked to identify gender of photos used in the new 'eye task' and to recognise the emotions of 6 different photos (whole face)
  • If they didn't pass these they weren't given the eye task as if they couldn't succeed in more basic tasks they couldn't succeed in the eye test
• Findings

  • Adults with autism did worse in the eye task (mean score of 16.5/25) than either normal adults (20.3/25) or people with tourettes (20.4/35)
  • Suggested that (1) deficit in theory of mind persists into adulthood for people with autism and (2) the eye test can pick this up
  • We are told results to the eye test were similar to those on strange story tests, establishing concurrent validity
• 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