Baron-Cohen et al

To test two hypotheses:

• Adults with autism or aspergers will be impaired on theory of mind test.
• Within the normal population, females will do better on the theory of mind test compared to males.

Quasi experiment using independent-measures design and self-report measures.

• IV = whether participant had autism or not
• DV = correct response on 'eyes task'

• Group one - 16 high-functioning autistic people (self-selected)
• Group two - 30 'normal' people (randomly selected)
• Group three - 10 people with tourette's syndrome (from referral centre)

Each participant was tested on 4 tasks - eye task, strange stories task, gender recognition and basic emotion recognition (Ekman).

Participants were tested in a quiet room either in the researcher's clinic, their own home or a lab at Cambridge University.

Performance on eyes task (by condition / mean score out of 25)

• autistic / 16.3
• normal / 20.3
• tourettes / 20.4

Performance on eyes task (by gender / mean score out of 25)

• normal male / 18.8
• normal female / 21/8

• Adults with autism had poorer performance on a subtle theory of mind test, which was not due to low intelligence or having a neuropsychiatric disability.
• Clinically 'normal' females performed better on the eyes task that clinically 'normal' males. Evidence for mpathising-systemising bias?