Studying Autism: comic strip stories

Question	Answer
Researcher	Baron-Cohen et al
Hypothesis	Autistic children have a specific deficit in understanding the thoughts of others, although not logical thinking in general. No ToM
Sample	Autistic, Down's and normal children
Method	Children had to arrange sequences of comic strip pictures in the right order, then explain the story. Stories depicted physical/mechanical events, behavioural events or mentalistic/belief stories
Results	Autistic children perform worse on the mentalistic story but better on the other 2
Conclusion	Autistics perform worse than other groups on a test requiring them to understand the beliefs of characters, but not on the tests requiring understanding of physical/behavioural events
Evaluation; strengths	use of matched control group increases the validity of the results
Evaluation; Limitations	A picture sequencing task is artificial i.e. not a task that represents everyday behaviour

Resource summary

	Created by annabel_summerfield about 10 years ago