Baron-Cohen et al

1. The participants were tested in 3 ways. 1 of these was the eye test. This was when 25 different pictures of were shown of an array of different emotions. The participants were given forced questions. Then they had to choice between two mental states. They had to guess which emotion they eyes were portraying. Another test was a strange story test. These were a happe story task in order to demonstrate the validity of the eye task as a test of ToM. If it was a valid test then the performance of the eye task should correlate with performance on the strange story task. 2. The dependent variable on the eye test is whether the participants can recognize the emotion of the eyes. The independent variable is the groups they tested. 3. It’s a quasi-experiment because the experimenter did not control the IV. 4. The two control groups were Tourette’s and ‘normal’ participants. This is because they wanted to see if it was a mental disorder, which meant they couldn’t understand the theory of mind and the ‘normal’ group, was a control group because it’s meant to compare to the general population. 5. Answered in question 4. 6. The investigation found Autism participants by putting an advertisement in a popular Autism magazine. The Tourette participants were selected because of the similarities between the Autism and Tourette. For example, they are all developmental disorders experienced from childhood. These disorders disrupted normal schooling and peer relations and all have been associated with abnormities with the frontal region of the brain. 7. One of the pairs was concerned and unconcerned. These were targets terms and foil. 8. In the eye task the findings were that normal and TS participants performed identically where as the autism and AS group were significantly less able to cope with the eye task. 9. The two control tasks were gender recognition and strange stories. The gender recognition was that they had to identify the gender from a pair of eyes. The strange stories were when you had to state whether someone was telling the truth or not. 10. One difference was Tourette’s because they were able to identify the right emotions with an average of 20.4. Whilst autism participants only had an average of 16.3. 11. The results of this study seem to provide evidence of ToM deficits in adults with Autism or AS, contrary to previous research with adults. This suggests that the theory of the mind becomes more advanced as it develops with age. 12. There was three groups of participants. One of the groups was made up off sixteen people with high functioning autism or Asperger’s syndrome. They all were of normal intelligence. There was 13 men and three women. Another group was fifty ages matched controls- 25 male, 25 female with no history of psychiatric disorder and presumed to be normal intelligence.