Baron-Cohen (1997) Flashcards
What is the theory of mind?
People with ASD lack the ability to understand what is going on in someone else’s mind. The theory of mind is not a theory, but is a belief set up by each individual.
What did Happe do?
Happe designed more TOM tests - the strange stories task. Pitched for 8 to 9 year olds. They were asked to judge the mental and physical state. Most of them had issues judging the mental state compared to the physical state.
What was the aim?
To extend Happe’s research and to investigate if high functioning adults with ASD did have a theory of mind by using more appropriate testing.
What was the type of experiment, experimental design and what type of study?
A quasi experiment, matched pairs design and a snapshot study.
What were the IVs and DV?
IV - someone with autism or someone without autism.
DV - the eye’s test.
What were the samples?
Group 1 - 16 participants with high functioning autism, self selected sample from an advertisement in the National Autistic Society Magazine.
Group 2 - 50 normal adults, age matched with the participants from condition 1, random sampling from a university in Cambridge.
Group 3 - 10 participants with Tourette’s syndrome age matched. self selected sampling from a clinic in London.
What were the control groups?
Group 2 and 3 served as the control groups to see if the ‘normal’ adults could cope with the tasks and see if people with TS could cope. TS has links to abnormalities in the frontal lobe. Group 1 and 3 had passed the first and second order false beliefs test.
What materials were used?
Photograph of the eye region of 25 different faces. The photographs were standardised (reliability) same size 15x15, all black and white photos and all of the same region of the face. They were presented with a photo of eyes of two terms such as ‘serious’ or ‘playful’. One term was the target (correct) and one was the foil. Pictures were shown for 3 seconds each.
What were the results?
Autism/ASD group did less well 16.3/25.
Normal/Ts group about the same 20.3/25.
Female (normal) preformed slightly better than males 21.8/25.
Normal males were significantly better than autism - 18.8/25.
What were the strange stories task results?
Group 1 - more difficulty with this test, made more errors. Performance on the eyes test should positively correlate with performance on the strange stories test. No TS participant made any mistakes but participants with autism were significantly impaired.
What were the results of task three - the gender recognition of eyes?
Control task where ASD participants in group 1 had to identify the gender of the eyes. Involved face perception but not mind reading. To check if impairments on the eyes task could be attributed in face perception.
What were the results of task four - basic emotion recognition task?
The control group ASD participants had to identify basic emotions in whole faces to demonstrate they could recognise emotional states in a simple task. 4 tests were presented in a random order.
What were the results for the gender and basic emotion tasks?
Group 1 performed normally on the gender recognition and basic emotion recognition tasks. This shows they could identify basic emotion just from seeing someone’s eyes. What they couldn’t do was interpret what this means in terms of an internal state.
