Baren-Cohen Study

Question 1

What is the Group 1 sample?

Answer 1

16 people with high functioning autism (4) or Asperger syndrome (12) consisting of 13 males and 3 females who were recruited through the advert in the National Autistic magazine and a variety of clinical sources

Question 2

What is the Group 2 sample?

Answer 2

50 normal age-matched adults consisting of 25 males and 25 females drawn from the general population of Cambridge

Question 3

What is the Group 3 Sample?

Answer 3

10 adults with Tourette’s Syndrome, 8 males 2 females, who were recruited from a tertiary referral centre in London

Question 4

What was the experimental method?

Answer 4

Quasi/Natural Experiment

Question 5

What was the independent variable?

Answer 5

Type of person likely to have Theory of Mind deficits (adults with autism/AS, normal or Tourettes) naturally occurring so can’t be manipulated

Question 6

What was the dependent variable?

Answer 6

Performance on the Eyes Task (out of 25) measured by showing participants 25 black and white photos of eyes and asking them to make a forced choice between two words that best describes what the person was thinking of feeling

Question 7

What was the experimental design?

Answer 7

Matched Pairs design because the normal and TS groups were age matched with the Group of adults with Autism/AS

Question 8

What were the mean scores of the results on the Eyes Task (out of 25)?

Answer 8

Autistic/AS- 16.3
Normal- 20.3
TS- 20.4

Question 9

What did Happé (1994) find out on some advanced Theory of Mind task?

Answer 9

Found her participants had more difficulty with the strange stories than matched controls

Question 10

Why was the gender recognition task included in the study?

Answer 10

Enabled Baron-Cohen et al. to check whether deficits on the Eyes Task were due to other factors

Question 11

Why was the basic emotion task included in the study?

Answer 11

Enabled Baron-Cohen et al. to check whether deficits on the Eyes Task were due to other factors

Question 12

Why was the strange stories task included in the study?

Answer 12

To validate the Eyes Task as a Theory of Mind task, scores on the Strange Stories should positively correlate with the Eyes Task

Question 13

What was the first step of the procedure?

Answer 13

The Eyes Task, Strange Stories and the two control tasks were presented in random order to all participants

Question 14

What did the gender recognition task involve?

Answer 14

Involved identifying the gender of the eyes used in the Eyes Task which controlled for face perception, perceptual discrimination and social perception

Question 15

What did the Basic Emotion Task involve?

Answer 15

Involved judging photographs of whole faces displaying basic emotions identified by Ekman (1992)

Question 16

Where were the participants tested?

Answer 16

Individually in a quiet room either in their own home, researchers clinic or in researchers laboratory at Cambridge University

Question 17

In the normal group who performed better?

Answer 17

Normal females performed significantly better on the Eyes Task (21.8) than normal males (18.8)

Question 18

Which group made significantly more errors on the strange stories task than the other groups?

Answer 18

The autism/AS group

Question 19

Was there any differences between the Gender and Emotion control tasks?

Answer 19

No

Question 20

What was the correlation within the Autism/AS group?

Answer 20

There was no significant correlation between IQ and the performance on the Eyes Task

Question 21

On Happés Strange Stories which groups made errors?

Answer 21

No participants with TS made any errors but the Autism/AS group were significantly impaired, making many errors

Question 22

What was the first possible conclusion?

Answer 22

Contrasting to the previous research with adults, the results provide evidence that adults with autism/AS posses and impaired TOM

Question 23

What was the second possible conclusion?

Answer 23

Reasonable to suggest that TOM deficits are independent of general intelligence, because some of the Autism/AS group have university degrees and were of normal intelligence

Question 24

What were the ranges of the scores in the results on the Eyes Task?

Answer 24

Autistic/AS- 13-23
Normal- 16-25
TS - 16-25

Question 25

Was did the participants have to do in the Eyes Task?

Answer 25

They had to look at persons (photographs from a magazine) and pick an emotion relating to the eyes, they were shown 25 photographs for 3 seconds each

Question 26

What did the participants have to do in the Strange Stories Task?

Answer 26

They were presented with two examples of each of the 12 story types, In each story the character said something that isn’t literally true and the participants were asked to explain how and why the character did what they did

Question 27

What did the participants have to do in the Gender Recognition Task?

Answer 27

Participants looked at the same set of eyes that were used in the Eyes Task and they were then asked to identify the gender of each person in the photo (out of 25)

Question 28

What did the participants have to do in the Basic Emotion Task?

Answer 28

Participants were shown photographs of whole faces (6) which displayed the six basic emotions (happy, sad, angry, afraid, disgust, suprised) which participants have to identify