Background/context
Autism = a lifelong disorder diagnosed in childhood
Autistic spectrum = struggle to understand others' behaviour, issues with language delay, lack of imagination
Savants = high functioning autistic people
Theory of mind = mind blindness is not understanding how others think or what emotions they feel
Appe found that people with aspergers had worse theory of mind
Tourettes syndrome = causes severe disruption to education and relationships, it involves movement or vocal tics and is usually socially inapropriate
Aim
To test whether Savants and people with Tourettes would struggle with theory of mind tasks, compared to 'normal' people
Method
Natural experiment, because the IV's were either austisic people, tourettes sufferers and normal people
The dv= performance on the eyes task
The eyes task was 25 photos of black and white male and female eyes, and the p's were given 2 choices between 2 mental states or emotions that the eyes were showing
Matched participants, matched by age
Procedure
Group 1= 16 high functioning autistic or asperger's individuals, recruited through an advert
Group 2= 50 normal adults, age matched to group 1, recruited from Cambridge
Group 3= 10 adults with tourette's, age matched also, recruited from a centre in London
The eyes, gender recognition and basic emotion tasks were presented in random orders to p's as well as a strange stories task
Examples of strange stories tasks =
P's were tested at their own homes or in a clinic, or at a lab at Cambridge
Findings
Strange stories task = asking children about emotions and the intentions of characters in the stories
mean score range
Austistic/aspergers 16.3/25 13-23
normal 20.3/25 16-25
tourettes 20.4/25 16-25
The scores for the tourettes group was not that different to the normal group, but both scored significantly higher than the A/A group
There was no difference between gender and emotions in the groups
No correlation between IQ and the eyes task performance results for A/A/ group
Conclusions
Results = A/A have impaired theory of mind, and this is independent of general intelligence because some from that group had university degrees
Evaluation
Research method- controlled settings so high validity
Low ecological validity
Groups may not have been well matched
Data type- quant., so easy comparison but no qual. data of how they felt or their thought processes
Ethics- volunteers, not deceived not distressed
Validity- controlled conditions, not realistic tasks but they had the extra strange stories task
Reliability- Standardised tasks and photos, and same time showing each one = consistency, high internal reliability and easy to replicate
Sample- sampling bias because there was only 3 females, so androcentric and un-generalisable, volunteer sample so lower validity there