Baren-Cohen Study Flashcards
What is the Group 1 sample?
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
What is the Group 2 sample?
50 normal age-matched adults consisting of 25 males and 25 females drawn from the general population of Cambridge
What is the Group 3 Sample?
10 adults with Tourette’s Syndrome, 8 males 2 females, who were recruited from a tertiary referral centre in London
What was the experimental method?
Quasi/Natural Experiment
What was the independent variable?
Type of person likely to have Theory of Mind deficits (adults with autism/AS, normal or Tourettes) naturally occurring so can’t be manipulated
What was the dependent variable?
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
What was the experimental design?
Matched Pairs design because the normal and TS groups were age matched with the Group of adults with Autism/AS
What were the mean scores of the results on the Eyes Task (out of 25)?
Autistic/AS- 16.3
Normal- 20.3
TS- 20.4
What did Happé (1994) find out on some advanced Theory of Mind task?
Found her participants had more difficulty with the strange stories than matched controls
Why was the gender recognition task included in the study?
Enabled Baron-Cohen et al. to check whether deficits on the Eyes Task were due to other factors
Why was the basic emotion task included in the study?
Enabled Baron-Cohen et al. to check whether deficits on the Eyes Task were due to other factors
Why was the strange stories task included in the study?
To validate the Eyes Task as a Theory of Mind task, scores on the Strange Stories should positively correlate with the Eyes Task
What was the first step of the procedure?
The Eyes Task, Strange Stories and the two control tasks were presented in random order to all participants
What did the gender recognition task involve?
Involved identifying the gender of the eyes used in the Eyes Task which controlled for face perception, perceptual discrimination and social perception
What did the Basic Emotion Task involve?
Involved judging photographs of whole faces displaying basic emotions identified by Ekman (1992)