baron Cohen

• background

  • autism is comprised of social, communication and imagination inabilities
  • theory of mind refers to the ability to read emotions and social cues from someone else
• aim - to show that adults with high functioning autism or Aspergers lack advanced theory of mind
• method

  • quasi experiment
• sample

  • 16 HFA , volunteer sampling from a magazine
  • 10 tourettes, volunteer sampling in a referral centre
  • 50 neurotypical selected at random
• procedure

  • HFA took part in all
  • tourettes took part in eyes task and happes strange stories
  • neurotypical eyes only
• eyes task

  • ps looked at a set of eyes and had to circle the emotion they thought the eyes were feeling
  • independent judges generated target words and foils and this was independently checked
• happes strange stories

  • ps had to answer questions about how characters in short stories might feel
• gender indentifcation

  • identify the gender of the eyes used
  • face perception being tested
• basic emotion task

  • ps shown full faces and asked to identify the correct emotion
  • to ensure the findings from the eyes task were not due to failures in ability to recognise basic emotions
• results

  • eyes task, autism mean score of 16/25 compared with 21/25 neurotypical, tourettes and neurotypical scored the same. performing at random chance resulted in 15/25 therefore autism have lack of advanced theory of mind
  • Ps with TS did not make any errors but ps with autism made significant errors, which means there is concurrent validity between the eyes task and this task. 
• conclusions

     adults with autism or asperges, despite being of normal IQ performed poorly on the eyes task. They concluded that the core cognitive deficit involved in autism did lack an advanced theory of mind. However, as some of the autistic group passes the eyes task, it is difficult to suggest that lacking a TOM is the core cognitive deficit. 
• strengths

  • quantitative data produced
  • reduction of extraneous variables
• weakbeses

  • 50% chance of success on eyes task therefore validity must be questioned
  • only 10 ps with tourettes therefore population validity low
• related to understanding disorders

  eyes task- people with autism (mean average score 16) performed significantly worse than the neurotypical group (mean average score 20). From this it was concluded that adults with HFA or asperges were impaired on the advanced theory of mind despite having average intelligence. This tells us that there is a cognitive deficit involved in theory of mind that people with HFA or asperges do not have, thus telling us more about the individual differences area. 

   
• relates to the area

  assumption - behaviour can be measured and quantified

  • uses the eyes task which produces quantitative data
• similarities with freud

  • some of data collection was completed in ps homes
  • volunteer sampling to gain ps
• differences with freud

  • bc had already been given a diagnosis, Hans had not
  • sample sizes very different
  • freud longitudinal