baron cohen Flashcards
what is the aim
to build on Happes research by using adult test to assess theory of mind competence in high functioning adults with autism
what did Happe find
tested adults with autism or aspergers syndrome on an advanced TOM task and found her p’s had more difficulty with her mental state stories than matched controls
what was the method
quasis experiment
what was the iv
the type of person likely to have theory of mind deficits (adults with high functioning autism, normal adults and adults with tourettes syndrome)
what was the dv
the perfrormance (score out of 25) on the eye task ; measured by showing each participant 25 black and white standardised photographs of the eye region and asking them to make a forced choice between two mental state words (target and foil) to best desrcibe what the person was thinking
what was the design
independant measures design
what was the sample group 1
16 people with high functioning autism. All normal intelligence and recruited through an advert in national autistic magazine (self selected sample)
what was the sample group 2
50 normal aged matched participants drawn from a univeristy pannel (random sample)
what was the sample group 3
10 adults with tourettes aged matched with groups 1 and 2
(self selected sample)
what was the strange stories task
participants were asked questions about mental state of the characters in the story and what they were thinking. this gives the eye task concurrent validity
what was the gender recognition task
involved identifying the gender of the eyes used in the eyes task. The task controlled for face perception, perceptual discrimination and social perception
what was the basic emotion recognition
involved judging photographs of whole faces displaying basic emotions. the task was done to check whether difficulties with the eye task were due to difficulties with basic emotion recognition
what were some of the results
-the autism group made significantly more errors on the strange stories task than either groups
autistic- 16.3
normal-20.3
ts- 20.4
what were the conclusions
these results seem to provide evidence that adults with autism do posess an impaired theory of mind
ethical considerations
consent
