Baron-Cohen Cognitive Psychology The Core Studies

Background Autism Communication disorder affecting ability to socialise with others and emphasise. Characteristics : Islet of ability, lack of eye contact, communication difficulties, set routines Tourette's Uncontrollable verbal and physical ticks Theory of mind Being able to recognise emotions in others and emphasise Ceiling Effect Easier to get high marks/scores

Aim To investigate if high functioning adults on the autistic spectrum would struggle with a new and more difficult task to test theory of mind

Sample The Autistic group 13 men 3 women All of normal IQ and between Self selecting via N.A.S magazine and doctors The Normal group 25 men 25 women All of normal IQ between Selected randomly from a participant list drawn from the general population of Cambridge The Tourette's group 8 men 2 women All of normal IQ Self selecting via referral clinic Used because they share similarities with Autistic/AS individuals by having an organic child-hood psychiatric disorder

Method Snapshot study Lab Experiment Quasi Experiment IV: The three different groups of participants those with Asperger’s syndrome, those with Tourette’s syndrome, ‘normal’ individuals. DV : Performance on the eyes task Controls The same set of eyes, all black and white, all shown for 3 seconds, everyone did all 4 tasks A quasi experiment is where the IV occurs naturally, it cannot be manipulated by the researcher. Here Baron-Cohen could not manipulate whether participants were ‘normal’, had autism/AS or had TS as they were pre-existing conditions.

Procedure Before entering onto the eyes task, participants had to partake in two control tests. These were the basic gender recognition task, and the basic emotion recognition task. The basic gender recognition task involved participants looking at pictures of eyes and then identifying the gender of the eyes. The basic emotion recognition task involved participants to look at pictures of basic emotions that people were showing in photos. The emotions shown were – happy, sad, angry, disgusted, surprised, frightened

Procedure Participants also had to complete a validity task. In this task, participants had to complete “strange stories” where they had to read a story about a character and then place themselves into their position, answering questions about them, and emphasising with them.

Procedure The eyes task was first trialled on a panel of judges who later came up with the target and foil words. The words were then trialled on 8 people before the official participants did it. Participants were shown a set of eyes for 3 seconds at a time, and the total score for the test was 25. Some of the word pairs were – Noticing you – Ignoring you, Attraction – Repulsion Participants had to state what emotion/action the eyes were displaying.

Results Overall all participants seemed to perform well on the control tasks. In the normal group, the average score of women was 21.8 whereas the average score of men was 18.8 The Tourette's group performed the best on the strange stories The autistic adults performed worse than both the normal adults and Tourette's adults. (16.3) GroupScore (mean) Autism16.3 Normal20.3 Tourette's20.4

Conclusions Difficulties with theory of mind is a factor of autism only Autism can be seen as an extreme form of the male brain Even normal people seem to struggle with theory of mind Women have better theory of mind than men IQ did not affect theory of mind abilities High functioning adults still struggle with theory of mind

What it tells us about T.O.M Adult autistics are less likely to possess a TOM than either normal or Tourette Syndrome adults, shown through the eyes task, where their average score was only 16.3 compared to the normal individuals whose score was 20.3 and the Tourette Syndrome adults whose average score was 20.4.

Strengths of the study Variables were very well controlled (intelligence, sex, developmental disorder etc…) so researchers could determine that autism was the main reason for the difficulties with theory of mind Quantitative data was collected which allows the results to be statistically analysed and groups can be meaningfully compared The procedure was standardised so researchers could conclude that the IV was affecting the DV

Weaknesses of the study Ecological validity can be seen as low because participants would not usually see just pictures of eyes in real life. In real life, hand gestures, facial expressions and body language demonstrate emotion so to have participants look at just eyes may have caused an artificial procedure. The study doesn’t produce qualitative data therefore we do not get an insight as to why participants chose the words on the eyes task and the reasoning behind their choice.

Evaluation of the method The study was classed as a lab experiment therefore we can expect the control of extraneous variables to be very high, therefore reliability is high. For example the procedure followed standardised routines and participants did the exact same things as each other Quantitative data was collected equalling in statistical analysis However ecological validity is a main problem There were only 3 female participants therefore can be seen as not generalizable enough to women with ASD

Evaluation of the sample The sample had a large age range so it can be classed as more generalizable to the wider community However because only 4 had high functioning Autism, this means that it might not be generalizable enough to all adults with it

Changes to the study In the original study, participants had to look at emotions just through pictures of eyes. The problem with this is that it makes the ecological validity of the study low because in real life human emotions, body language, hand gestures etc…would be present along with the emotion that the person is feeling. I would implement a video to be shown to participants so that they could see other factors relating to how the person is feeling. Due to there only being 4 high functioning Adults with Autism, the generalizability of the study is an issue. I would try to include 5 high functioning and 5 Asperger participants.

Effects of the changes By including video tapes demonstrating more factors that display emotion in humans, ecological validity would raise as the study would be more representative of real life. However by doing so, the study may stray away from testing theory of mind accurately enough. By including more high functioning Autism participants, this means that the results collected can be more generalizable to the wider population thus making the study’s results more reliable and representative.