All groups of participants could pass the gender recognition task and the basic emotion task

The photographs were taken from magazines and were all in colour

One of the groups of participants consisted of sixteen participants with high functioning autism or Asperger syndrome. They all were of normal intelligence and were all males

The independent variable is the performance on the advanced test of theory of mind (eyes task).

On the Strange Stories Task none of the participants with Tourette syndrome made any mistakes whereas many of the participants with autism and Asperger syndrome had difficulties with this task.

The foil word was always the semantic opposite of the correct word.

All participants in the autistic and Asperger syndrome condition and Tourette syndrome condition had been tested and found to be to be able to pass first and second order false belief tasks.

The eye task was high in ecological validity as it is an everyday task just like that of real live social situations.

The participants were all tested individually in their own homes.

Happe developed an advanced theory of mind test called the strange stories task

Baron-Cohen et al argue that the core deficit involved in Tourette syndrome is the lack of an advanced theory of mind.

Autism is usually characterised by four main impairments

The first and second order tasks which use dolls are called the Kim and Sharon tests

One of the aims of the study to demonstrate that high functioning adults with autism or Asperger syndrome would not be impaired on a theory of mind test called the ‘Reading the Mind in the Eyes Task’

Three groups of participants were tested – participants with high functioning autism or Asperger syndrome, ‘normal’ adults’ and participants with Tourette syndrome.

The dependent variable is the type of participants used – participants with high functioning autism or Asperger syndrome, ‘normal’ participants and participants with Tourette syndrome.

Baron-Cohen et al argue that the results of the study provide experimental evidence for subtle theory of mind deficits in individuals with autism or Asperger syndrome.

The researchers argue that first and second order tasks cannot be used with adults as they have a ceiling effect.

One of the groups of participants consisted of fifty age-matched controls (25 male and 25 female) with no history of psychiatric disorder and presumed to be of normal intelligence.

The experiment mainly collected qualitative data