People with autism lack theory of mind. High functioning autistics have an intact theory of mind -> ceiling effect
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Describe the research method used by Baron-Cohen
Quasi experiment, matched pairs (on age)
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What was the IV in this study?
Autistic/Not/Tourettes
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What was the DV in this study?
Score on Eyes task
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Describe the sample of autistics
16 high-functioning autistics/Asperger syndrome. Normal intelligence. Recruited via advert. (13 male 3 female)
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Describe the 'normal' sample
50 adults, 25 male 25 female, drawn from the general population of camrbidge
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Describe the Tourettes sample
10 adults (8 male 2 female) recruited from referral centre in London
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Describe the Eyes task
Each ppt was shown 25 black and white standardised photographs of the eye region of faces (male and female) make a choice between 2 mental state words to describe what the person was feeling.
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Which control tasks were used?
Gender recognition and Basic emotion recognition
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Outline the Basic emotion task
ppt were shown whole faces with basic emotions to check if difficulties on eyes task were due to not recognising basic emotions (happy, sad, angry, afraid, disgust, surprise)
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Why was the strange stories task included?
To validate the eyes task
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Outline the strange stories task
Ppt is presented 2 examples of each of 2 story types. These include Lie, White lie, Joke, Figure of speech and Irony. Ppt is asked to explain why the character said what he/she did.
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Outline Baron-Cohen's two hypotheses
Ppt with autism would show significant impairment on the eyes task relative to the other two groups. Normal females would perform significantly better on the eyes task than normal males would.
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Outline the results of the eyes task in terms of the three different groups
Mean score for adults with TS (20.4) was not significantly different from normal adults (20.3) but were both significantly higher than the autism group (16.3)
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Outline the results of the eyes task in terms of male vs female
Normal females performed better on the eyes task (21.8) than the normal males (18.8)
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