Baron-Cohen

Question 1

What is Autism Spectrum Disorder defined as in the DSM-V?

Answer 1

• persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction: socio-emotional reciprocity, nonverbal communicative behaviours used for social interaction, deficits in developing, maintaining and understanding relationships
• restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour, interests or activities: stereotyped/repetitive motor movements/ use of objects/speech, insistence on sameness and inflexible adherence to routines, highly restricted and fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity/focus, hyperactivity to sensory input/unusual interests in sensory aspects of environment

Question 2

What is the Theory of Mind?

Answer 2

-ability to attributing mental states to others which allow us to think about why people do the things that they do, help predict behaviour

Question 3

Who were the participants?

Answer 3

• 20 autistic children (6-16 years)
• 14 children with Down’s syndrome (6-17 years)
• 27 typically developing children (3-6 years)

Question 4

What was the procedure?

Answer 4

• completed Sally-Anne task which was followed by 3 questions
• false belief question (diagnostic): where will Sally look for the marble?
• reality question (control): where is the marble really?
• memory question (control): where was the marble in the beginning?

Question 5

What were the findings?

Answer 5

• all children gave correct responses to the memory and reality questions
• for the false belief question: down’s syndrome and ‘normal’ had similar results (86% and 85% correct), autistic children mostly failed the question (20% correct)

Question 6

What were the conclusions?

Answer 6

• selective impairment in ToM, independent of general intelligence
• children with ASD don’t understand their belief and Sally’s belief will be different (inability to represent mental states in others)
• one of the first cognitive account of ASD (mindblindness hypothesis)

Question 7

What are the main criticisms?

Answer 7

• ToM doesn’t provide full account of autism: only focuses on social features of autism, doesn’t emphasise restricted repertoire of interests, insistence of sameness, or peaks of abilities. there are 2 additional cognitive accounts (executive disfunction hypothesis and weak central coherence)
• ToM deficits aren’t specific to autism: also found in schizophrenia, unipolar and bipolar depression, conduct disorders, right-hemisphere damage
• ToM deficits aren’t universal to autism: not all with autism fail it, there has been development of more sophisticated ToM tasks

Question 8

What are conclusions on second-order FBT?

Answer 8

• some with ASD show first-order ToM
• still unable to handle second-order FBT (not fully representational ToM)
• Bowler (1992) found young adults with ASD succeeed in second-order FBT
• in response to Bowler, 2 hypotheses were developed: that individuals with autism show delays in the development of ToM and that surface level performance should be distinguished from actual competence (those who pass the tests use different cognitive strategies)

Question 9

What are other criticisms?

Answer 9

-problems with interpretation of FBTs: typically developing children pass, ASD children/adults pass

Question 10

What are the alternative explanations?

Answer 10

-social orientation hypothesis: poses the question of whether social cognition deficits can be explained by lack of social orientation

Question 11

What are the scientific contributions?

Answer 11

• impact on research areas: developmental psychology, philosophy of mind, pragmatics, cognitive science, deception, imitation, prosocial behaviour
• empathising-systemising (Baron-Cohen, 2009): newer theory to account for non-social theories, uses 2 dimensions

Question 12

What are the applied contributions?

Answer 12

• insight into cognitive processes underlying ASD
• inspired development of ways looking at ASD
• social acceptance