Baron-Cohen: Understanding Disorders (Individual Differences) Flashcards
What is the background to Baron-Cohen’s study?
- Some evidence that a Theory of Mind deficit is not a core cognitive deficit in autism
- No conclusive evidence that high functioning autistic adults have an intact TOM
- Existing TOM tests are too easy for adults
- Happe found that autistic adults had more difficulty with her mental state stories than the control group
What was the experiment method and design used in Baron-Cohen?
Quasi with an independent measures design
What was the IV and DV in Baron-Cohen?
IV - autistic adults, neurotypical adults, or adults with Tourette Syndrome
DV - the performance (a score out of 25) on the Eyes Task
What was the sample of Baron-Cohen’s study?
Group 1: 16 autistic adults, 13 male and 3 female, all of normal intelligence and recruited through an advert in the National Autistic magazine
Group 2: 50 neurotypical, age matched adults, 50:50 gender split, drawn from the general population of Cambridge
Group 3: 10 adults with Tourettes, age matched, 8 males and 2 females, all were of normal intelligence and were recruited from a tertiary referral centre in London
What was the procedure of Baron-Cohen’s study?
- Eyes task, strange stories task, and the two control tasks (gender recognition of eyes and basic recognition) were presented in random order to all participants
- Gender Recognition Task involved identifying gender of the eyes
- Controlled for face and social perception and perceptual discrimination
- Basic emotion - emotions show in photographs of the whole face
- Strange Stories Task (emotions and intentions of characters) to validate results from Eyes Task
- Eyes task - 25 black and white photos with 2 options
- Tested in a quiet room (at home or in a lab)
What were the key findings of Baron-Cohen’s research?
- Mean score for TS was 20.4, 20.3 for neurotypical group, and 16.3 for the autistic group
- Neurotypical females performed better than neurotypical males, but neurotypical males did better than the autistic group
- Autistic group made significantly more errors on the Strange Stories task
- No difference between groups on Gender and Emotion control tasks
What conclusions can be drawn from Baron-Cohen’s research?
- Contrary to previous research, results seem to provide evidence that autistic adults do possess an impaired theory of mind
- Theory of Mind deficits are independent of general intelligence
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research methods in Baron-Cohen’s research?
- IV not manipulated so can’t establish cause and effect
- Independent measures so other participant variables may have affected results as groups weren’t matched
- 2 control groups helped isolate the extent that it was autism causing a difference
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the different types of data in Baron-Cohen’s research?
- Quantitative data (score out of 25)
- Results compared between conditions
- No qualitative data such as the reasoning behind the participants answers
What ethical considerations are there in Baron-Cohen’s study?
- Weren’t deceived
- Kept confidential
- May have been demeaning or distressing to do the tasks
- Gave consent but this may not have been fully informed
Can Baron-Cohen’s research be considered valid?
- Low ecological validity - in real life you see things in 3D and colour
- Vision could be an extraneous variable
- Different screens could have different resolutions
- Extraneous variables due to taking tests in different conditions
- Random order reduced order effects
- Concurrent validity - Strange Stories task
Can Baron-Cohen’s research be considered reliable?
- Panel on whom the photographs in the Eyes task was made up of 8 people
- Relatively small sample sizes
- Participants shown the same Pictures of the same size for the same time (15x10cm for 3 seconds)
Was there any sampling bias in Baron-Cohen’s research?
- Obtained through a range of different sampling methods
- Autistic and Touretts groups were androcentric
- All groups matched for age
Can Baron-Cohen’s research be considered ethnocentric?
- All from the UK
- Autism and Tourettes are largely genetic and occur irrespective of culture
- May be variation between cultures in the amount of experience people have at reading people’s emotions from the eyes alone (eg. living somewhere in which Muslim women wear the niqab)
What practical applications of Baron-Cohen’s research are there?
Teaching neurotypical people to be aware of autistic differences and making use of verbal and visual cues.
