Leer La Mente

17 procedure
Subjects in all four groups were tested on the revised adult eyes test, as described earlier. This was individually administered in a quiet room in Cambridge or Exeter. Subjects in the AS/ HFA group were also asked to judge the gender of each person in each photo, as a control task, given anticipated impairments on mental state recognition task during piloting so, to save time ,were not required to do this task. In addition, subjects in groups 1, 3 and 4 completed the AQ ( baron – cohen y Wheelwright, in press). Finally, subjects were asked at the outset to read throught the glossary ( se appendix B) and indicate any word meanings they were unsure of . they were then encouraged to read these particular meanings and were told that they could return to this glossary at anypoint during the testing.
18 eyes test development
Target words and foils were generated by the first two author and were then piloted on groups of eight judget (four ale, four female).the criterion adopted was that at least five out of eight description for each stimulus and that no more than two judges picked any single foil. Items that failed to meet this criterion had new target words, foils,or both generated and were then repiloted with successive groups of judget until the criterion was met for all items.
The data from groups 2 and 3 did not differ from each other so the results were combined, creating a sample of N= 225. Table 2 shows the results of an item analysis on this combined group. New criteria were applied to these data: at least 50 % of subjects had to select the targetword and no more than 25% could selected any one of the foils. These criteria were arbitrarily selected but with the aim of checking that a clear majority of the normal controls selected the target word and that this was selected at least twice as often as any foil. Items 1, 2 , 12 and 40 failed to meet these criteria and were therefore dropped. Subsequent analyses were carried out using 36items. Thus target word were established on the basis of consensus from a large population, since there is no objective method for identifying the underlying mental state from an expression. The complete list of target mental state words (in italic) and their foils are shown in appendix A. the glossary of mental state terms is shows in appendix B.
19.- Results:
Subjects in the four groups did notdiffer in the number of words in the glossary that they were unsure of, and in all subjects, the number of words checked never exceeded two. Table 3 shows the means and standard deviations on the Revised Eyes Task for each of the four groups, and the results of the AQ for Group 1, 3 and 4 only. A oneway ANOVA comparing the four groups on the Revised Eyes Task revealed that there was a significantlyworse than the other three groups, who did not differ from each other. This is shown graphically in Fig. 3. Sex differences were examined in groups 2 and 3, using an ANOVA of Group x Sex. The sex difference approached signicance, F(1.224) = 3.38, p = .067, with females scoring higher than males, whilst the interaction was insignificant, F81.224) = 0.79, p = .376. Separate group item analyses areshown in Table 4. All subjects with AS/HFA scored 33 or above out of 36 on the gender recognition control task. There were no within group differences in Group 3 (students) according to subject studied, F(1.99) = 1.39, p = .24.
On the AQ, as expected, Group 1 scored significantly higher than Group 3 and 4: one way ANOVA of group, F(2.103) = 23.4, p = .00001; Scheffé`s tests indicated Group 1 scoredsignificantly higher at the .05 level than Group 3 ant 4, for which there was no difference. The predicted sex difference on the AQ (males scoring higher than females) in Group 3 was also found (t = 1.97, p = .03 for one tailed significance). Finally, the correlation between AQ score, IQ score, and Eyes Test score was computed. Combining the groups, there was no correlation between the Eyes...