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The main aim of this experiment was to investigate if high functioning adults with autism or Asperger syndrome would be impaired on a theory of mind test

The researchers were also interested to find out if females would be better than males on the

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Group 1 consisted of sixteen participants with high functioning autism or Asperger syndrome. They were all of normal intelligence. There were 13 men and 3 women. The participants were recruited using an advert in the National Autistic Society magazine as well as through clinics.

Group 2 consisted of fifty age-matched controls (25 male and 25 female) with no history of psychiatric disorder and presumed to be of normal intelligence. They were selected randomly from the subject panel held in the University Department.

Group 3 consisted of ten participants with Tourette syndrome recruited from a referral centre in London. These participants were also age matched with groups 1 and 2. There were eight men and two women, mirroring the sex ratio of group 1. They were all of normal intelligence.

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All participants in group 1 and 3 had been tested and found to be to be able to pass first and second order false belief tasks. This means that any failure on the Eyes Task could be attributed to problems with mind reading problems beyond that of a six year old.
It was expected that only participants in group 1 would be significantly impaired on the eye task. The Eyes Task, the Strange Stories Task, and the two control tasks were presented in random order, to all participants and they were tested individually in a quiet room either in their own home, in a researcher's clinic, or at a lab at the University.

To check whether deficits on the Eyes Task were due to other factors, the researchers administered two control tasks to the participants in Group 1 - the gender recognition task and the basic emotion recognition task.

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The Basic Emotion Recognition Task (Emotion Task) involved judging photographs of whole faces displaying the basic emotions. This was designed to check whether any deficits on the Eyes Task could be attributed to a deficit in basic emotion expression recognition. Six faces were used, testing the following basic emotions: happy, sad, angry, afraid, disgusted, and surprised.

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The Eyes Task comprises of photographs of the eye region of 25 different male and female faces. The photographs were taken from magazines and were standardised in that they were all black and white, all from the same region of the face (from midway along the nose to just above the eyebrow) and all of the same size. Each picture was shown for three seconds and participants were given a forced choice question between two mental states printed under each picture. The foil word was always the semantic opposite of the correct word. The Experimenter says to the subject" Which word best describes what this person is feeling or thinking?" The maximum score on this test is 25.

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As predicted high functioning adults with autism or Asperger syndrome did have more difficulties with the Eye Task than both ?normal? adults and adults with Tourette syndrome.

It was also found that normal adult males had more difficulties with the Eye Task than normal adult females.

On the Strange Stories Task none of the participants with Tourette syndrome made any mistakes whereas many of those participants with autism and Asperger syndrome had difficulties with this task.

On the Gender and Emotion Control Tasks, there were no differences between the groups.

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(RESULTS) Condition- Mean score on the eye task

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(RESULTS) Condition- Mean score on the eye task

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Adults with autism or Asperger syndrome | 16.3
'Normal' adults | 20.3
Adults with Tourette syndrome | 20.4

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(RESULTS) Condition- Mean score on the Eye Task

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(RESULTS) Condition- Mean score on the Eye Task

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'Normal' males | 18.8
'Normal' females | 21.8

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1) state the sample of baron Cohen's study (2)
2) state two controls used in Baron Cohen's study of autism (3)
3) Explain one strength of gathering quantitative data in baron Cohen's study (2)

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The Gender Recognition Task involved looking at the same sets of eyes in the experimental task, but this time identifying the gender of the person in each photograph. This is a social judgement without involving mind reading, and allowed the researchers to check if any deficits on the Eyes Task could be attributed to general deficits in face perception, perceptual discrimination, or social perception. This also had a maximum score of 25.