Baron-Cohen et al (1997) - Autism in Adults

What is the aim?

To investigate if high functioning adults with autism or Asperger syndrome would be impaired on a theory of mind test called “The Eye Task”

What is the experiment type?

Quasi as the IV is naturally occurring

The study was conducted in different places for each participant (home/lab/clinic) so doesn't have specific experiment type

What is the experimental design?

Matched pairs - aged matched

What was the DV?

The performance on Eyes Task - out of 25

What was the procedure of the eyes task?

Participants were shown black and white photographs of the eye region of 25 different faces (male and female), would be shown for 3 second then asked “which word best describes what this person is feeling or thinking?” (two words were given per picture)

One option was the target word (correct) and the other was the foil word (complete opposite of the target word)

What was the purpose of the Happe’s strange stories task?

To test the (concurrent) validity of the eyes task

What were the control tasks?

Gender recognition test - shown the image of the eyes and asked what gender

Basic emotion recognition test - shown images of whole faces and asked to identify emotion (6 basic emotions were used e.g happy/sad)

What were the results?

Both quantitative and qualitative data

• Females perform significantly better on the theory of mind test compared to males (females mean score 21.8 out of 25)

• Neurodivergent people ( with autism/AS) showed significant impairments on the theory of mind test compared to “normal adults” and participants with Tourette’s

Who were the participants?

Group 1: 16 participants with autism/ aspergers, normal intelligence, 13 males and 3 females, self-selected sampling

Group 2: 50 “normal” adults, 25 of each gender, random sampling

Group 3: 10 people with Tourette's syndrome, age matched with groups 1 and 2, 8 males and 2 females, helped to control extraneous variables

What conclusions can be made?

Adults with autism/AS possess an impaired theory of mind

“Normal” females are better at recognising emotional states in the eyes than men