Autism Awareness Leaflet Autism is a disorder of neural development and affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their synapses connect and organize. But how exactly does autism affect people on a day to day basis? Characteristics of people with autism include; difficulty with non verbal and verbal social communication, difficulty with social relationships and difficulty in the development of imagination. Other features can include; learning difficulties, obsessive interests, resistance to change in routine, odd mannerisms and repetitive behaviour patterns. Children with Asperger Syndrome, have similar deficiency in social skills but unlike other autistics, have a normal IQ. Many (but not all) are also exceptionally skilled or talented in a specific area. It’s important to understand the difference but also the similarities between autistics and those with Asperger syndrome. Psychiatrist of Johns Hopkins University, Leo Kanner, would describe the following features as common in all autistic children; a lack of emotional contact with other people, intense insistence of sameness in their routines, muteness or unusual speech, fascination with manipulating objects, major learning difficulties but high levels of visuo- spatial skills or rote memory and an attractive, alert, intelligent appearance. After understanding the basis to autism and the characteristics which apply, we can relate this to the Baron-Cohen study. Baron-Cohen argues that a lack of theory of mind is not only present in the autistic spectrum but seems to be the main feature. Theory of mind is the ability to infer, in other people, a range of mental states such as beliefs, desires, intentions, imaginations and emotions. Baron-Cohen had to undertake a new experiment to test ToM in adults because the current test only tested ToM in children aged 6. Therefore the results had a ceiling effect not giving us truly reliable information as to whether autistic adults lacked theory of mind or not. Page 1 Lauren Crouch

Autism Awareness Leaflet Page 2 Baron- Cohen developed the new test – ‘The Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task’ which essentially tested ToM in adults. The experiment consisted of three groups. Group 1 consisted of 16 people with high functioning autism or Asperger syndrome, (13 men, 3 women). Group 2 consisted of 50 aged matched controls, (25 men, 25 women). Lastly, Group 3 consisted of 10 adult patients with Tourettes syndrome also age matched with groups 1 and 2. The reason for using TS was due to the similarities between TS and AS, therefore both the 2 nd and 3 rd groups acted as controls. All 3 groups took part in ‘The Eyes’ test and it was believed that only group would be significantly impaired due to their supposed lack of ToM. As part of the eye test participants were shown 25 photographs of the eye region of 25 different faces and were then given an option of two mental states to detect the correct one. One out of the two mental states was a ‘foil’ and had the opposite meaning to the mental state being expressed in the photograph, therefore any difficulty in choosing the correct term would imply a lack of theory of mind. Significantly, the autistic/AS group 1 performed less well on ‘The Eyes’ task that the other two groups who had almost identical results. To improve the concurrent validity of the experiment, a second task was created to support the first. This was called the ‘Strange Stories’ task. The TS group had no problem with this task however, the autistic/AS group were significantly impaired, correlating with the previous results from ‘The Eyes’ task, proving the experiment had concurrent validity. Lastly, there were two control tasks that only groups 1 and 3 were tested on; Gender Recognition and Basic Emotion Recognition. These tasks were issued to ensure that any difficulties encountered on ‘The Eyes’ task were not a result from any other factors, and in fact both groups had no difficulties with the control tasks therefore proving that Group 1’s impaired difficulties on the ‘Eyes Task’ was a result of a lack of theory of mind. This study showed how a lack of theory of mind is present in autistic/AS people over the age of 6. We can therefore try to understand the social difficulties they must face in day to day life regarding relationships, communication and development of imagination. Lauren Crouch