Baron-cohen

Background

Autistic individuals often find it difficult to understand other people's thoughts and emotions, a difficulty explained by the Theory of Mind (ToM) deficit. Earlier ToM tests, like the original "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" task, were too easy and had design problems. Baron-Cohen and colleagues developed an updated, more advanced version of the Eyes Task to better measure subtle ToM abilities in adults with Autism or Asperger syndrome and compare them with neurotypical controls.

aim

1. To test whether adults with autism/aspeger's syndrome would be impaired on the Theory of Mind test (Eyes Task)

2. 2. To test whether female perform better on Eyes task than men

research method

• quasi (natural) experiment - IV: the type of person likely to have theory of mind deficits (adults with high-functioning autism/As, 'normal' adults and adults with tourette syndrome) - DV: performance on eyes task - score out of 25 - Independant measures design

sample

3 groups of participants were tested from UK

what was group 1 of the sample

16 individuals with high-functioning autism or Asperger syndrome - all were of normal intelligence and recruited through an advert in National Autistic magazine and a variety of clinical sources - sex ratio 13:3 (m:f)

what was group 2 of the sample

50 normal age-matched adults (25m:25f), drawn from subject panel of the university department compromising of general population of Cambridge (excluding university members)

what was group 3 of the sample

10 adults with tourettes syndrome also age-matched with groups 1 and 2. Sex ratio 8m:2f. All were normal intelligence and were recruited from a tertiary referral centre in London

what was the purpose of group 3

a clinical control group with some similarities with autism e.g. - intelligence in a normal age - developmental disorder since childhood - evidence they involve frontal abnormalities - cause disruptions to normal schooling and normal peel relations

procedure

the eyes task, the strange stories and the two control tasks (gender recognition of eyes task, basic emotion recognition task) were presented in random orders to all participants. Participants were tested individually in a quiet room either in their own home, in the researchers' clinic or in the researchers laboratory at Cambridge University

Eyes task

• shown 25 black and white standardised photographs of the eye region of faces (male and female) - asked to make forced choice between 2 mental state words to describe what person in photo was feeling or thinking - these states included both basic and complex mental states - the target and foil were semantic opposites

Control tasks

gender recognition task involved identifying the gender of the eyes used in the Eyes task - this task controlled for face perception, perceptual discrimination and social perception

the basic emotion recognition task involved judging photographs of whole faces displaying 6 basic emotions identified by Ekman (1992). Participants had to make a force choice - done to check whether difficulties on the eyes task were due to difficulties with basic emotional recognition

what was the mean score on the eyes task for Autistic/AS participants

16.3

what was the mean score on the eyes task for 'normal' participants

20.3

what was the mean score on the eyes task for TS participants

20.4

results of eyes task comparing females and males

Neurotypical females performed significantly better than neurotypical males on eyes task (mean 21.8 vs 18.8) but the neurotypical males were significantly better than the Autism/AS group (mean 18.8 vs 16.3)

key findings: other tasks

• the Autism/AS group made significantly more errors on the strange stories task than either of the other groups - on control tasks, no difference between the groups

• within the Autism/AS group there was no significant correlation between IQ and performance on the eyes task - on Happes strange stories, no participants with TS made any errors but those with Autism/AS were significantly impaired, making errors

possible conclusions

• contrary to previous research with adults, these results seem to provide evidence that adults with Autism/AS do possess an impaired theory of mind - as some of the Autism/AS group hold university degrees and were all of normal intelligence, it is reasonable to suggest that theory of mind deficits are indipendantant of general intelligence