Autism The findings of baron-cohen et al.
What is autism? Many people believe autism to be a straight forward disease you either have it or you don’t This simply couldn’t be further from the truth there is a whole spectrum of autism from severely autistic people to very mildly autistic people. Autism affects social communication and especially they have trouble with social cues Baron-cohen believes this social impairment to be a lack of advance theory of mind (ToM) Theory of mind is the ability to be able to infer what someone is meaning by there body language and facial expressions
How it affects people in everyday life People on the autistic spectrum find some everyday tasks difficult. Conversations may be difficult especially with more than one person as they may not be able to track everyone’s social cues if they have to think about them. Many autistic people have obsessive behaviours these obsessions may seem odd to a person unaffected by this condition these obsessions may manifest themselves as a pass time they pursue with much dedication to a degrading obsession where they obsess about something so much they devote much of there life to it. Due to these effects many severely autistic people are introverts keeping themselves to there selfs and not entering into social communication very much.
Theory of mind Theory of mind is a idea that people infer from body language and other cues the state of another’s mind as there isn’t a direct connection from one persons mind to another. Baron-cohen believed there to be defects in people on the autistic spectrum, “theory of mind” he tested this by doing a lab experiment on autistic people using them as an experimental group and tourettes syndrome and normal people as the control the tourettes group was included due to them also having frontal lobe abnormality’s to rule out it being due to frontal lobe abnormality’s He tested it by devising a new theory of mind test to test adults that involved inferring someone’s state of mind from just a picture of there eyes. The results showed that the autistic group had trouble with the task but the normal and tourettes group had little to no trouble with the task
Eyes task The eyes task was developed by baron-cohen to test for ToM defects in autistics it involved showing them small pictures of just a persons eyes and eyebrows and then they was given a forced choice question to choose what they believed the person in question mental state was The forced choice they had to take had two options a foil and the right answer the foil was the opposite of the shown mental state The results showed experimental evidence for defects in ToM in autistic people but not In tourettes syndrome or normal people showing it is to do with theory of mind not frontal lobe abnormality s