One hypothesis about why there are so many more boys and men on the autism spectrum than there are girls and women is that boys and men, for whatever reason, are more likely to get diagnoses of autism spectrum conditions.
One of the reasons commonly put forward by people (including me) making this argument is that the diagnostic criteria reflect a picture of autism derived disproportionately from autistic boys and men, and autistic girls and women differ sufficiently from their male counterparts in their abilities, behavior, developmental histories etc. to ensure that they will often fail to meet those criteria.
While browsing PLOS ONE I found a couple of recent-ish articles looking into what those differences might be.
The more recent study, just published this week, involved giving four largish groups of participants (one autistic and one neurotypical group within each sex, with each group having thirty-two people in it) a battery of tests designed to measure five different skills: theory of mind, emotion recognition, executive functioning, perceptual attention to detail, and manual dexterity.
What are all those things and how would you go about measuring them? Well, the first of those skills, theory of mind --- also called cognitive empathy or mind-reading --- is one I've written a lot about on this blog. I've also written a lot (usually in the same posts) about the tool psychologists seem to use most of the time to assess this skill in adults: the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. I don't think I need to say anything more about either the skill or the test; the test is relatively straightforward, a series of black-and-white photographs of faces, cropped to show only the eyes, paired with a choice of four emotion words. You are supposed to guess which of the words best describes what the person whose eyes are in the photograph is feeling.
I listed theory of mind and emotion recognition separately, even though the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test obviously involves both. There's another test the researchers used, one that they describe as a test of emotion recognition, that reads to me like it's almost the same thing as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, only it uses pictures of entire faces instead of just eyes. It's called the Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces Test.
To test the participants' executive-functioning abilities, the researchers used something called the Go/No Go Task. This involves pressing buttons on a computer keyboard in response to certain cues appearing on the computer screen; in this study the cues were arrows pointing either to the right or to the left. (Right and left were each associated with a different target key: P for right and Q for left. So the people taking the test were literally minding their P's and Q's!) The test also includes extraneous cues that test takers are not supposed to respond to. So what's being tested is not just one's ability to hit a key when a light goes on; it's also one's ability to restrain one's key-hitting impulse when something close to, but not exactly like, the target stimulus appears.
There were some other things the researchers included under the umbrella of executive functioning: working memory (tested by having the participants repeat nonsense syllables), word generativity (ability to come up with lots of words beginning with the same letter in a short amount of time) and motor planning, which they tested using the Assembly subtest of the Purdue Pegboard Test. (This involves putting simple objects together in a set order using whatever hand they tell you to use.) This obviously assesses manual dexterity as well as the ability to figure out what you need to do in what order (i.e., motor planning), although they also had the participants complete the other parts of the Purdue Pegboard Test to test manual dexterity alone.
Finally, the test they used to measure attention to detail was the Embedded Figures Test, which I've also blogged about before, noting that autistic people have shown a particular aptitude for this task.
The results are mostly unsurprising: the autistic study participants did worse at both of the facial-expression-interpreting tasks, and also at pressing the right key in the Go/No Go task. On the two language-related memory tasks, they performed no differently than the control group. (This is not surprising given that all of the participants are described as "high-functioning," having average-to-above-average IQs (about 115, plus or minus about 15 points) with verbal IQ greater than or equal to performance IQ).
The emotion-recognition data get more interesting when you look more closely at them, though; apparently the autistic study participants had more trouble identifying some emotions than others. Fear was the one it took them longest to recognize; it was also the hardest one for the non-autistic people to identify, too, but the gap between the two groups' average reaction times is the biggest in this category. It took the autistic study participants, on average, somewhere between four and five seconds (closer to five) to identify the fearful faces. For the non-autistic participants, it took maybe three and a half seconds. Happy faces were the easiest for both groups to identify, and the difference between groups was only half a second compared to the 1-1.5 second gap in their response times to fearful faces. All the other reaction times are clustered within a relatively narrow range for both groups: between 2.5 and 3 seconds for the autistic group, and between 2 and 2.5 for the control group. So, even though fear was tricky for everyone, it proved especially challenging for the autistic people. The study authors guess that maybe this is because autistic people studiously avoid looking at other people's eyes, and the eyes are apparently the most important cue that someone looks frightened.
There were also a couple of novel findings, too, though. For instance, on the Assembly component of the Purdue Pegboard Test, it was only the autistic men who had any problems relative to their same-sex control group. The autistic women were, you might say, indistinguishable from their peers.
But the most surprising thing, for me, was their results on the Embedded Figures Test. This is a pretty solidly defined Thing Autistic People Are Really Good At, yet in this study, where there was a difference between autistic and non-autistic groups, it was the non-autistic people who found the hidden shape faster. (That was also true for the men and not for the women).
In general, the authors describe a pattern of male and female autistics having more or less the same degree of impairment in what they call the "hallmark" of autism spectrum conditions, which is inability to pick up on another person's nonverbal cues to their mental or emotional states*, but with the autistic men, and not women, also having additional impairments in other domains.
The authors point out that this contradicts what had been conventional wisdom about cognitive sex differences within autism, which held that autistic women were usually more severely disabled than autistic men**.
I haven't forgotten about the other, earlier study; I'm just going to give it its own post so as not to make this one overlong.
Lai, M., Lombardo, M., Ruigrok, A., Chakrabarti, B., Wheelwright, S., Auyeung, B., Allison, C., , ., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2012). Cognition in Males and Females with Autism: Similarities and Differences PLoS ONE, 7 (10) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0047198
*This elusive quality can be called theory of mind, mentalizing, "mind-reading" or empathizing. It may also involve more than one cognitive, emotional or perceptual ability, but this study doesn't really go into that.
**To be REALLY picky, this study doesn't address the issue of intellectual disability, as no one who participated in it would meet the criteria for having ID. This shows that autistic men of slightly above average IQ are more likely to have problems with motor planning and figure disembedding.
Showing posts with label Simon Baron-Cohen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Simon Baron-Cohen. Show all posts
Monday, October 29, 2012
Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Another "Extreme Female Brain" Sighting
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Simon Baron-Cohen's E-S theory of autism, sex differences and whatever else he's applied it to lately states that people have one of three basic cognitive styles: Type E, the empathizer, who understands people and relationships; Type S, the systemizer, who understands abstract ; and Type B, who can do both. Prof. Baron-Cohen has identified autism as exemplifying the Type S cognitive style taken to extremes, but hasn't written much about its opposite, the extreme Type E, or Extreme Female Brain. He allows that it must exist, but he doesn't think it would be as disabling in modern society as an Extreme Male Brain --- autism --- is. Other people (Crespi and Badcock) have suggested paranoid psychosis as the condition typical of the Extreme Female Brain, as it involves being morbidly obsessed with other people. In the paper I discuss here, a pair of evolutionary psychologists make the case that the psychopathology characteristic of the Extreme Female Brain is disordered eating.
The paper I discuss in this blog post describes a series of four different "experiments" in which groups of college students, of varying size (as large as n = 160, as small as n = 37), are given multiple psychometric exams. They are tested for the following things: disordered eating, sensitivity to other people's judgments, Empathizing Quotient (EQ), Systemizing Quotient (SQ), performance on various tasks considered representative of either empathizing or systemizing (e.g. guessing what emotion people in photographs are feeling, or mentally rotating three-dimensional objects), and schizotypal personality disorder. Some of the data are compatible with the idea of a high-empathizing, low-systemizing Extreme Female Brain that is particularly susceptible to disordered eating, and some are not.
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Today on the fascinating psychology blog BPS Research Digest, I saw that some other researchers think they've found a candidate for an Extreme Female Brain, which according to Simon Baron-Cohen's E-S theory ought to exist, probably in about the same numbers as the Extreme Male Brain (which he identifies as autism) does, but which hasn't been described in the psychological literature.
The new article, by evolutionary psychologist Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. and assistant professor of psychology Jennifer Bremser --- both affiliated with the State University of New York --- and published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, tries to make the case that eating disorders stem from the heightened sensitivity to others' judgments that is characteristic of the Extreme Female Brain.
What they did was to give a group of undergraduate psychology students at SUNY a battery of tests: the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT), which looks for disordered attitudes about eating (sample questions: "I feel extremely guilty after eating"; "I feel that food controls my life"); the Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale, which measures how anxious you are about what other people think of you (sample questions: "I often worry that I will say or do the wrong thing"; "I feel very upset when I commit some social error"; "When I am talking to someone, I worry about what they may be thinking about me"); Simon Baron-Cohen's Empathizing and Systemizing Quotients (which I have critiqued here and here); the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (PDF), which tests for nine traits associated with schizotypal personality disorder: ideas of reference (which means thinking that other people, or the media, are talking specifically to or about you when they aren't really), excessive social anxiety, odd beliefs or magical thinking, unusual perceptual experiences, odd or eccentric behavior, a lack of close interpersonal relationships, odd speech, constricted affect (i.e., not being very good at showing one's feelings), and general suspiciousness; and several tests that measure skills that would be associated with either an empathizing or systemizing cognitive style: the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, the Intuitive Physics Test and the Redrawn Vandenburg and Kuse Mental Rotations Test (Version A). Then they looked for relationships between all of these different test scores, and between any given score and the test taker's sex.
Their hypothesis --- that an empathizing cognitive style is more characteristic of women than of men, and tends in its extreme form towards disordered eating and social anxiety --- would predict the following: women scoring higher, on average, on the EQ and Mind in the Eyes tests, and lower on the SQ, Intuitive Physics, and Mental Rotation tests; women scoring higher than men on the measures of disordered eating and fear of negative evaluation, and high scores on those measures being correlated with high scores on the EQ and Mind in the Eyes tests for both sexes.
They found significant differences between the sexes on the measures of disordered eating and fear of negative evaluation (both were higher for women), and also on the EQ, but not on the SQ. Women were also likelier to display something called "empathizing bias", which they defined numerically as each study participant's z-score on the EQ minus their z-score on the SQ. (Z-scores are a measure of how far an individual's score on a given statistical measure is above or below the average score. A negative number means the person, or sub-group, scored below average, while a positive number means they scored above average). Thus, the empathizing bias score is supposed to represent how much better a person does at empathizing than systemizing (or not, if it's zero or a negative number).
There was also a disparity between how participants scored on the EQ and SQ versus how they did on the more "objective" measures of systemizing or empathizing skill, the Intuitive Physics, Reading the Mind in the Eyes and mental rotation tests. The sexes differed strongly on their (self-reported) EQ scores, but performed almost identically on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. Obviously guessing what emotion a black-and-white photograph of a stranger's eyes is meant to convey is very different from accurately gauging the emotional states of one's relatives and friends, so that still leaves open the possibility that women perform better at this task when it involves real people who are known to them, but it's just as likely that women tend to overrate, and men to underrate, their interpersonal sensitivity on self-reported measures, and that real differences between the sexes on this ability are minimal.
The opposite pattern occurred between the SQ and one of the "objective" measures of systemizing ability: men and women scored equally on the SQ, but men outperformed women on the Intuitive Physics test. (I can't find any results on the mental-rotation test broken down by sex).
There was also a very inconsistent pattern of correlations between disordered eating, fear of negative evaluation and the various systemizing and empathizing variables. High scores on the disordered-eating measure correlated with high scores on the fear-of-negative-evaluation (FNE) measure, and also with high scores on the EQ. There was no relationship between SQ scores and either disordered eating or fear of negative evaluation, and EQ and SQ scores were positively correlated with each other. Most strangely, SQ scores were correlated positively with empathizing bias: the number that reflects the imbalance between one's empathizing and systemizing abilities!
Also, within each sex the overall pattern of disordered eating patterns correlating with greater empathic ability (whether self-reported or "objectively" measured) seems to fall apart.
Two graphs, Figure 1 and Figure 2, show bars for average male and female performance on both the EQ and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, at low and high ends of the disordered-eating spectrum. According to these graphs, women score about the same on these tests regardless of whether they show disordered eating patterns or not, and for men the results are all over the place. On one test (the Mind in the Eyes), men who score low on the Eating Attitudes Test do equally well with all women, while men who score higher do more poorly on average, but their range of results is very, very broad. The error bar is wider than the bar on the graph is tall.
On the EQ, the men show more or less the pattern the researchers expected: men at the high end of the disordered-eating spectrum scored higher than men at the low end on average, but for the former group especially there was a lot of within-group variation.
They also found correlations between disordered eating, fear of negative evaluation and several of the traits that make up schizotypal personality disorder: disordered eating correlates positively with ideas of reference (i.e., thinking everything refers to you, specifically), magical thinking and suspicion. Fear of negative evaluation correlates positively with ideas of reference, suspicion, social anxiety and constricted affect. (This latter makes sense --- if you are afraid people are judging you, of course you are going to try and minimize the extent to which those people are able to tell what you're thinking or feeling! It's called a "poker face".)
They also wanted to see if any of these psychological problems --- disordered eating, fear of negative evaluation, schizotypal personality disorder or any of its component traits --- interfered with one's ability to rotate three-dimensional objects in one's head. (Their reasoning for doing this wasn't just for giggles --- let's take a bunch of emotionally stressed people and ask them to do something both pointless and difficult! Hilarious! --- it can be hard to shake the idea that a lot of psychological experiments are done with precisely that objective --- but because they wanted to see if people who were unusually and morbidly concerned with what other people thought of them, and were thus "hyper-mentalizers" who would be reckoned extreme empathizers in Simon Baron-Cohen's typology would also show the expected impairment in systemizing tasks.
Annoyingly, they did not compare people's scores on the mental-rotation task with their scores on other direct measures of systemizing or empathizing ability: they assumed, given earlier findings, that high scorers on the measures of disordered eating and fear of negative evaluation are also high empathizers. As I have said above, the data are less than clear in their support of this assumption.
They found that people (they do not break it down by sex, probably because at this stage in the study they were dealing with a lot fewer participants) who scored high on their measure of disordered eating tended to do worse at mental rotations, consistent with their prediction. However, they also found a small (too small to be significant) positive correlation between mental-rotation scores and fear of negative evaluation. Of those two things, I'd consider the FNE score to be the more pure indicator of a "hypermentalizing" excess of concern for what other people think; there's a lot that's still unknown about the psychology of eating disorders, to the point that calling disordered eating a behavior born out of a fear of negative evaluation by others would be speculative.
The correlations they found between the various schizotypal personality traits and mental rotation ability surprised me, too. You'd think, if greater skill at mental rotation of three-dimensional objects indicated a logical, "systemizing" type of mind, that there would be a strong negative correlation between mental-rotation scores and those schizotypal traits that bespeak irrationality, like magical thinking or ideas of reference. (Especially magical thinking). But no, there's no correlation between either of those things and how well one does at mental-rotation tasks. The only components of schizotypal personality disorder that showed any significant relationship to mental rotation were social anxiety and constricted affect, both of which were negatively correlated.
A negative correlation between skill at mental rotation and one's score on the social anxiety subscale of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire does fit with the researchers' idea of "hyper-mentalizing" at the expense of systemizing. But the lack of such a correlation with fear of negative evaluation does not fit, and instead makes one wonder if what's going on is, instead, anxious people's anxiety interfering with their ability to perform the rotations.
In their Discussion section, the researchers do not comment on most of these discrepancies, but the one they do address --- worse performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test* by people with more severely disordered eating --- they attribute to those people's having greater, not less, emotional sensitivity**. Why, they're so sensitive they see things that aren't even there, so they do poorly on certain tests of emotional sensitivity and interpersonal acuity like the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test.
I'm being silly, but that really is their explanation:
I do not doubt at all that people who have this kind of hypersensitvity exist --- I know a few! What I doubt is that 1) these people are all the same, and all have this skill for the same reason; 2) these people are any likelier to develop eating disorders than the general population; and 3) these people are necessarily bad at "systemizing," which seems to include such things as logical reasoning, pattern recognition, organization and spatial cognition. Indeed, the data from this same study suggest that people who are good at one half of the empathizing/systemizing duality seem to be good at the other half, too.
You can also count me as agnostic, still, on the question of whether women are, overall, better empathizers and men better systemizers. I don't rule it out, as at least some cognitive differences between the sexes do seem to exist, and show up consistently in studies, but as yet I don't see strong empirical support for it.
Also, they dance around this in their Discussion section, but never directly address it: disordered eating is quite common in autistic girls and women, and even non-autistic people with eating disorders, particularly anorexia, perform similarly to autistic people on tests of mentalizing ability (the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test again), mirror self-recognition, emotion recognition, body awareness, executive function and central coherence (the Embedded Figures Test).
If autism is supposed to be the Extreme Male Brain, and the Extreme Female Brain is supposed to be its opposite, doesn't that complicate things a lot?
Bremser JA, and Gallup GG Jr (2012). From one extreme to the other: Negative evaluation anxiety and disordered eating as candidates for the extreme female brain. Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 10 (3), 457-86 PMID: 22947672
*In the present study, it was only the male participants who showed this pattern, but the researchers cite lots of other studies of people with eating disorders, particularly anorexia nervosa, who show the same impairment. Some of the other researchers hypothesized that insufficient nutrition made those patients less able to perform complex cognitive operations of any sort, which sounds convincing to me.
**I am having UNBELIEVABLE trouble spelling "sensitivity" today. I always seem to leave out one of the "I's".
The paper I discuss in this blog post describes a series of four different "experiments" in which groups of college students, of varying size (as large as n = 160, as small as n = 37), are given multiple psychometric exams. They are tested for the following things: disordered eating, sensitivity to other people's judgments, Empathizing Quotient (EQ), Systemizing Quotient (SQ), performance on various tasks considered representative of either empathizing or systemizing (e.g. guessing what emotion people in photographs are feeling, or mentally rotating three-dimensional objects), and schizotypal personality disorder. Some of the data are compatible with the idea of a high-empathizing, low-systemizing Extreme Female Brain that is particularly susceptible to disordered eating, and some are not.
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| Thought to exist, but seldom glimpsed in the wild |
The new article, by evolutionary psychologist Gordon G. Gallup, Jr. and assistant professor of psychology Jennifer Bremser --- both affiliated with the State University of New York --- and published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, tries to make the case that eating disorders stem from the heightened sensitivity to others' judgments that is characteristic of the Extreme Female Brain.
What they did was to give a group of undergraduate psychology students at SUNY a battery of tests: the Eating Attitudes Test (EAT), which looks for disordered attitudes about eating (sample questions: "I feel extremely guilty after eating"; "I feel that food controls my life"); the Fear of Negative Evaluation Scale, which measures how anxious you are about what other people think of you (sample questions: "I often worry that I will say or do the wrong thing"; "I feel very upset when I commit some social error"; "When I am talking to someone, I worry about what they may be thinking about me"); Simon Baron-Cohen's Empathizing and Systemizing Quotients (which I have critiqued here and here); the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (PDF), which tests for nine traits associated with schizotypal personality disorder: ideas of reference (which means thinking that other people, or the media, are talking specifically to or about you when they aren't really), excessive social anxiety, odd beliefs or magical thinking, unusual perceptual experiences, odd or eccentric behavior, a lack of close interpersonal relationships, odd speech, constricted affect (i.e., not being very good at showing one's feelings), and general suspiciousness; and several tests that measure skills that would be associated with either an empathizing or systemizing cognitive style: the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, the Intuitive Physics Test and the Redrawn Vandenburg and Kuse Mental Rotations Test (Version A). Then they looked for relationships between all of these different test scores, and between any given score and the test taker's sex.
Their hypothesis --- that an empathizing cognitive style is more characteristic of women than of men, and tends in its extreme form towards disordered eating and social anxiety --- would predict the following: women scoring higher, on average, on the EQ and Mind in the Eyes tests, and lower on the SQ, Intuitive Physics, and Mental Rotation tests; women scoring higher than men on the measures of disordered eating and fear of negative evaluation, and high scores on those measures being correlated with high scores on the EQ and Mind in the Eyes tests for both sexes.
They found significant differences between the sexes on the measures of disordered eating and fear of negative evaluation (both were higher for women), and also on the EQ, but not on the SQ. Women were also likelier to display something called "empathizing bias", which they defined numerically as each study participant's z-score on the EQ minus their z-score on the SQ. (Z-scores are a measure of how far an individual's score on a given statistical measure is above or below the average score. A negative number means the person, or sub-group, scored below average, while a positive number means they scored above average). Thus, the empathizing bias score is supposed to represent how much better a person does at empathizing than systemizing (or not, if it's zero or a negative number).
There was also a disparity between how participants scored on the EQ and SQ versus how they did on the more "objective" measures of systemizing or empathizing skill, the Intuitive Physics, Reading the Mind in the Eyes and mental rotation tests. The sexes differed strongly on their (self-reported) EQ scores, but performed almost identically on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. Obviously guessing what emotion a black-and-white photograph of a stranger's eyes is meant to convey is very different from accurately gauging the emotional states of one's relatives and friends, so that still leaves open the possibility that women perform better at this task when it involves real people who are known to them, but it's just as likely that women tend to overrate, and men to underrate, their interpersonal sensitivity on self-reported measures, and that real differences between the sexes on this ability are minimal.
The opposite pattern occurred between the SQ and one of the "objective" measures of systemizing ability: men and women scored equally on the SQ, but men outperformed women on the Intuitive Physics test. (I can't find any results on the mental-rotation test broken down by sex).
There was also a very inconsistent pattern of correlations between disordered eating, fear of negative evaluation and the various systemizing and empathizing variables. High scores on the disordered-eating measure correlated with high scores on the fear-of-negative-evaluation (FNE) measure, and also with high scores on the EQ. There was no relationship between SQ scores and either disordered eating or fear of negative evaluation, and EQ and SQ scores were positively correlated with each other. Most strangely, SQ scores were correlated positively with empathizing bias: the number that reflects the imbalance between one's empathizing and systemizing abilities!
Also, within each sex the overall pattern of disordered eating patterns correlating with greater empathic ability (whether self-reported or "objectively" measured) seems to fall apart.
Two graphs, Figure 1 and Figure 2, show bars for average male and female performance on both the EQ and the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, at low and high ends of the disordered-eating spectrum. According to these graphs, women score about the same on these tests regardless of whether they show disordered eating patterns or not, and for men the results are all over the place. On one test (the Mind in the Eyes), men who score low on the Eating Attitudes Test do equally well with all women, while men who score higher do more poorly on average, but their range of results is very, very broad. The error bar is wider than the bar on the graph is tall.
On the EQ, the men show more or less the pattern the researchers expected: men at the high end of the disordered-eating spectrum scored higher than men at the low end on average, but for the former group especially there was a lot of within-group variation.
They also found correlations between disordered eating, fear of negative evaluation and several of the traits that make up schizotypal personality disorder: disordered eating correlates positively with ideas of reference (i.e., thinking everything refers to you, specifically), magical thinking and suspicion. Fear of negative evaluation correlates positively with ideas of reference, suspicion, social anxiety and constricted affect. (This latter makes sense --- if you are afraid people are judging you, of course you are going to try and minimize the extent to which those people are able to tell what you're thinking or feeling! It's called a "poker face".)
They also wanted to see if any of these psychological problems --- disordered eating, fear of negative evaluation, schizotypal personality disorder or any of its component traits --- interfered with one's ability to rotate three-dimensional objects in one's head. (Their reasoning for doing this wasn't just for giggles --- let's take a bunch of emotionally stressed people and ask them to do something both pointless and difficult! Hilarious! --- it can be hard to shake the idea that a lot of psychological experiments are done with precisely that objective --- but because they wanted to see if people who were unusually and morbidly concerned with what other people thought of them, and were thus "hyper-mentalizers" who would be reckoned extreme empathizers in Simon Baron-Cohen's typology would also show the expected impairment in systemizing tasks.
Annoyingly, they did not compare people's scores on the mental-rotation task with their scores on other direct measures of systemizing or empathizing ability: they assumed, given earlier findings, that high scorers on the measures of disordered eating and fear of negative evaluation are also high empathizers. As I have said above, the data are less than clear in their support of this assumption.
They found that people (they do not break it down by sex, probably because at this stage in the study they were dealing with a lot fewer participants) who scored high on their measure of disordered eating tended to do worse at mental rotations, consistent with their prediction. However, they also found a small (too small to be significant) positive correlation between mental-rotation scores and fear of negative evaluation. Of those two things, I'd consider the FNE score to be the more pure indicator of a "hypermentalizing" excess of concern for what other people think; there's a lot that's still unknown about the psychology of eating disorders, to the point that calling disordered eating a behavior born out of a fear of negative evaluation by others would be speculative.
The correlations they found between the various schizotypal personality traits and mental rotation ability surprised me, too. You'd think, if greater skill at mental rotation of three-dimensional objects indicated a logical, "systemizing" type of mind, that there would be a strong negative correlation between mental-rotation scores and those schizotypal traits that bespeak irrationality, like magical thinking or ideas of reference. (Especially magical thinking). But no, there's no correlation between either of those things and how well one does at mental-rotation tasks. The only components of schizotypal personality disorder that showed any significant relationship to mental rotation were social anxiety and constricted affect, both of which were negatively correlated.
A negative correlation between skill at mental rotation and one's score on the social anxiety subscale of the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire does fit with the researchers' idea of "hyper-mentalizing" at the expense of systemizing. But the lack of such a correlation with fear of negative evaluation does not fit, and instead makes one wonder if what's going on is, instead, anxious people's anxiety interfering with their ability to perform the rotations.
In their Discussion section, the researchers do not comment on most of these discrepancies, but the one they do address --- worse performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test* by people with more severely disordered eating --- they attribute to those people's having greater, not less, emotional sensitivity**. Why, they're so sensitive they see things that aren't even there, so they do poorly on certain tests of emotional sensitivity and interpersonal acuity like the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test.
I'm being silly, but that really is their explanation:
Comparable to the heightened sensitivity to sensory stimuli (auditory, visual and tactile) common among people with autism, individuals with the EFB [Extreme Female Brain] may be hypersensitive to social stimuli. Disordered eating may ameliorate the experience of negative evaluation anxiety that results from heightened sensitivity to social stimulation.
Consistent with this idea, emotional processing deficits have been linked with eating disorders including the inability to recognize, label and describe emotions in detail and to link feelings with bodily correlates (Bourke, Taylor, Parker and Bagby, 1992 [link]; Eizaguirre, de Cabezon, de Alda, Olariaga and Juaniz, 2004 [PDF]; Garner, Olmsted and Polivy, 1983 [link]) Also, compared to healthy controls, women with anorexia had difficulty recognizing emotions from facial expressions and vocal tones (Jansch, Harmer and Cooper, 2009 [link]; Kucharska-Pietura, Masiak and Treasure, 2003 [link]).
Jones, Harmer, Cowen and Cooper (2008) [link] investigated emotional face processing in female undergraduates with high and low levels of disordered eating. Participants completed the Eating Attitudes Test-26 and the Facial Expression Recognition Task, a computer task in which participants view faces depicting 7 different expressions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, surprise, and neutral) at different intensities. The participants with higher levels of disordered eating were less accurate in identifying happy and neutral faces. Among participants with high levels of disordered eating, there was a tendency to classify more happy faces as neutral, and more neutral faces as either angry or sad. In addition, there was evidence that reaction times to recognize disgust were longer, while reaction times to recognize fear were faster than participants with low levels of disordered eating. When disordered eating reaches clinical levels, the effects of hyper-mentalizing may manifest as mental state misattributions. This may be because they are using their own experience to model the experience of others, and their bias to classify emotions with a negative bias may influence their attributions. For instance, when shown pictures of women who are said to have overeaten, females with high levels of disordered eating ascribed more negative emotional states to these women than control participants do. Thus, women with higher levels of disordered eating appeared to use their own experience of overeating to describe how the other women would feel (Beebe, Holmbeck, Schober, Lane, Rosa, 1996 [link]).
It is also possible that the physiological and cognitive effects of starvation produce deficits in performance. In a study looking at performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, individuals with anorexia performed worse compared to healthy controls (Russell, Schmidt, Doherty, Young and Tchanturia, 2009 [link].
An alternative explanation is that low scores on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task does not represent a deficit of theory of mind ability, but rather an excess that reflects hypermentalizing. Abu-Akel (2003) [PDF] suggests that theory of mind dysfunctions range from the complete absence of the ability to represent other people's mental states (as shown in severe autism) to having the representational understanding of mental states, but a deficit in the ability to apply this understanding (as in Asperger's syndrome) to the abnormal or excessive attribution of mental states (as in schizotypy). It may be that this third class of dysfunction is misconstrued as a deficit, rather than an excess. Consistent with this interpretation, the RME is one of the most widely used instruments to investigate theory of mind performance in adults; however, scores on the RME depend only on accuracy. The test does not identify the nature of the errors that impede performance. For example, there can be errors of absence (failing to detect a mental state when it is present) and errors of excess (wrongly inferring a mental state in its absence). We suspect the second class of errors (errors of excess) account for most of the lower scores on this test among individuals with anorexia.(They also seem to be arguing that people cursed with an excessive degree of awareness of other people's judgment of them might be self-medicating by starving themselves: if they are women, they will produce much less estrogen, which the authors believe "may also produce changes in empathizing and theory of mind performance." So that's a novel proposal --- people with eating disorders starve themselves to dull their razor-keen interpersonal sensitivity, in the interests of making their lives bearable. Obviously there's no evidence for this, and I've never seen anyone who has an eating disorder describe it like that, but at least it does people with eating disorders the courtesy of treating them as rational beings, which not all of the accepted explanations do.)
I do not doubt at all that people who have this kind of hypersensitvity exist --- I know a few! What I doubt is that 1) these people are all the same, and all have this skill for the same reason; 2) these people are any likelier to develop eating disorders than the general population; and 3) these people are necessarily bad at "systemizing," which seems to include such things as logical reasoning, pattern recognition, organization and spatial cognition. Indeed, the data from this same study suggest that people who are good at one half of the empathizing/systemizing duality seem to be good at the other half, too.
You can also count me as agnostic, still, on the question of whether women are, overall, better empathizers and men better systemizers. I don't rule it out, as at least some cognitive differences between the sexes do seem to exist, and show up consistently in studies, but as yet I don't see strong empirical support for it.
Also, they dance around this in their Discussion section, but never directly address it: disordered eating is quite common in autistic girls and women, and even non-autistic people with eating disorders, particularly anorexia, perform similarly to autistic people on tests of mentalizing ability (the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test again), mirror self-recognition, emotion recognition, body awareness, executive function and central coherence (the Embedded Figures Test).
If autism is supposed to be the Extreme Male Brain, and the Extreme Female Brain is supposed to be its opposite, doesn't that complicate things a lot?
Bremser JA, and Gallup GG Jr (2012). From one extreme to the other: Negative evaluation anxiety and disordered eating as candidates for the extreme female brain. Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behavior, 10 (3), 457-86 PMID: 22947672
*In the present study, it was only the male participants who showed this pattern, but the researchers cite lots of other studies of people with eating disorders, particularly anorexia nervosa, who show the same impairment. Some of the other researchers hypothesized that insufficient nutrition made those patients less able to perform complex cognitive operations of any sort, which sounds convincing to me.
**I am having UNBELIEVABLE trouble spelling "sensitivity" today. I always seem to leave out one of the "I's".
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Simon Baron-Cohen Responds to Criticism from an Autistic Blogger - Part II
Now, I'd like to focus on the first two points in Simon Baron-Cohen's response to Rachel Cohen-Rottenburg, where he addresses her argument that autistic people's generally heightened perceptual sensitivity, and our lack of any sort of filtering mechanism, tends to make us more empathic, not less.
She says:
He replies:
(I am basing the above paragraph on what Rachel has written in this post on the Sally-Anne test for Theory of Mind, as well as her three-part series critiquing the EQ. Her post on the Sally-Anne test, in particular, is interesting because it describes an alternate thought process for a hypothetical autistic child taking the test, and coming up with reasons why Sally might look in other places than where the researcher wants her to look. What's important is that it's not that the kid in this example can't imagine Sally's point of view, it's that ze is drawing on different thought processes and experiences to arrive at different predictions for what Sally will do. The problem with the test is that it treats all wrong answers as failures to imagine Sally's mental state.)
Because I understand Prof. Baron-Cohen's need for empirical validation of these possibilities, I've even come up with an experimental design he (or anyone) could use to evaluate the two-way-street hypothesis that I've been promulgating here.
You'd have a bunch of people, half of them autistic and half of them not, and you would group them into pairs, with each pair including one autistic and one non-autistic member, both the same sex, same age and roughly similar verbal abilities, and just have them interact together for a short while, like 5-10 minutes. You would record their interaction on video, and then you would ask each person, separately, some questions about what happened between them. What they thought felt at certain points (decided on by the researchers sometime between the actual exchange and the individual Q&A sessions), what they thought the other person was thinking or feeling at certain points. You would then compare the two participants' answers to see how well they overlapped. You would also do this with autistic/autistic and NT/NT pairings, and then compare the average degree of similarity of the paired accounts across all three permutations.
This would allow you to see whether autistic people seem to understand each other better than they do NTs, or whether NTs are equally baffled by autistics.
It would also end the stalemate between Baron-Cohen's "well, the evidence says autistic people just don't understand social situations" and autistic people's self-reported experiences of both understanding other autistic people, and of having non-autistic people spectacularly fail to understand, or empathize with, them.
She says:
Many of us experience such a high degree of empathy that we are constantly putting ourselves in other people's shoes and trying to see all sides in any controversy or conflict. Many of our problems with sensory and emotional overload derive from an excess of this ability, not a deficit.
He replies:
1. Rachel challenges whether people with autism have 'theory of mind' difficulties and instead argues that people with autism have high degrees of empathy.I am not Rachel, but it seems to me like she wasn't denying the existence of those results at all; just saying that those results don't tell us much of anything about what the autistic people in the various studies were actually thinking that led them to do the test "wrong." We know that autistic people don't interpret social situations the same way non-autistic people do; what we don't know is how autistic people do interpret them.
This is however hard to reconcile with the scientific evidence. Literally dozens of studies from around the world have documented the theory of mind difficulties in autism. And the empathy difficulties are also well documented and widely replicated, both on performance tests (e.g., emotion-recognition tests from the face and voice) and on self-report measures (such as the Empathy Quotient or EQ).
Consider the latter, where 81% of people with autism score less than 30/80 on the EQ, by their own self-report, whilst only 12% of people without autism score at this low level. These results are mirrored when parents complete the EQ about their children, in many independent samples. So, whilst some people believe that theory of mind and empathy difficulties in autism are mythical, the results of many independent scientific studies suggest otherwise.
...
2. Rachel challenges whether people with autism have difficulty knowing when they have hurt others, and wishes I had not stated that children with Asperger syndrome (AS) are delayed in being able to figure out what might hurt another person. Indeed, she finds my statement hurtful.
As a working scientist, all I can do is summarize the empirical evidence. An example is the Faux Pas Test, where children are asked to identify if anyone said anything they shouldn't have said, whilst listening to short audio recorded stories. Children with AS as a group on average scored significantly lower than children without AS, despite being older than the comparison group. Indeed, the design of this experiment allowed us to estimate the size of the developmental delay in AS, since the 12 year old children with AS performed more like typical 9 year olds. So, although Rachel may not like hearing these results, this is what the science finds.
(I am basing the above paragraph on what Rachel has written in this post on the Sally-Anne test for Theory of Mind, as well as her three-part series critiquing the EQ. Her post on the Sally-Anne test, in particular, is interesting because it describes an alternate thought process for a hypothetical autistic child taking the test, and coming up with reasons why Sally might look in other places than where the researcher wants her to look. What's important is that it's not that the kid in this example can't imagine Sally's point of view, it's that ze is drawing on different thought processes and experiences to arrive at different predictions for what Sally will do. The problem with the test is that it treats all wrong answers as failures to imagine Sally's mental state.)
Because I understand Prof. Baron-Cohen's need for empirical validation of these possibilities, I've even come up with an experimental design he (or anyone) could use to evaluate the two-way-street hypothesis that I've been promulgating here.
You'd have a bunch of people, half of them autistic and half of them not, and you would group them into pairs, with each pair including one autistic and one non-autistic member, both the same sex, same age and roughly similar verbal abilities, and just have them interact together for a short while, like 5-10 minutes. You would record their interaction on video, and then you would ask each person, separately, some questions about what happened between them. What they thought felt at certain points (decided on by the researchers sometime between the actual exchange and the individual Q&A sessions), what they thought the other person was thinking or feeling at certain points. You would then compare the two participants' answers to see how well they overlapped. You would also do this with autistic/autistic and NT/NT pairings, and then compare the average degree of similarity of the paired accounts across all three permutations.
This would allow you to see whether autistic people seem to understand each other better than they do NTs, or whether NTs are equally baffled by autistics.
It would also end the stalemate between Baron-Cohen's "well, the evidence says autistic people just don't understand social situations" and autistic people's self-reported experiences of both understanding other autistic people, and of having non-autistic people spectacularly fail to understand, or empathize with, them.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Simon Baron-Cohen Responds to Criticism from an Autistic Blogger - Part I
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Many autistic and feminist bloggers have criticized Simon Baron-Cohen's theories about autism and gender differences, but not very many have had him respond to their criticisms personally. Rachel Cohen-Rottenburg is one of those lucky people; she posted a critique of his E-S theory on her blog a couple years ago, and he has just now written a ten-point response to it. In this part of the post, I talk about Rachel's objection that the characterization of autistic people as poor empathizers ignores the differences between cognitive and affective empathy, and that even autistic people who lack cognitive empathy often have great capacity for affective empathy. I also talk about Baron-Cohen's response to this objection, and how his thought on empathy and autism has undergone a further evolution in the two years since Rachel wrote her post.
_________________________________________________
Sandrine (a French woman living in Turkey, who has an autistic son) at The Paris Ankara Express pointed me to this guest post by the famous autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen at the Autism Blogs Directory.
In his guest post, Prof. Baron-Cohen responds to criticism of his Empathizing-Systemizing (E-S) theory of autism from Rachel Cohen-Rottenburg, who writes the blog Journeys with Autism and also curates a web-anthology on Autism and Empathy.
He identifies ten points that Rachel makes in her essay, and writes a paragraph (or two or three) addressing each one. They seem to be split about half and half between questioning Baron-Cohen's conception of empathy (as in, autistic people actually tend to be quite sensitive to other people's emotions, particularly distress) and questioning whether his model is actually any more descriptive, or helpful, than older "deficit" models.
(You could argue --- and many people do --- that the E-S/Extreme Male Brain theory is still a deficit model since it considers a deficit in empathizing skills to be a defining characteristic of autism; it offsets this by also including normal or superior systemizing skills as part of the definition, but if you look at most of the psychological, educational, or behavioral literature on autism, you find all sorts of articles on remediating, or sounding the depths of, autistic deficits and not very much on nurturing or characterizing autistic strengths. So the offset deficit model isn't actually offset all that much, in practice.)
Rachel's post is a response to this paper from 2009 (Rachel's post is also from 2009) spelling out what the E-S theory says about autism. The article describes the E-S theory, particularly its evolution from Baron-Cohen's earlier "mindblindness" theory of autism. He lists five things the earlier model failed to explain that he thinks the newer one does adequately explain: 1) nonsocial aspects of autism, like attention to detail, love of patterns or routines, stimming etc., 2) empathy isn't just "mind-reading", it's also feeling something for the other person, and the "mindblindness" model only deals with mind-reading, 3) autism isn't the only condition that can produce mind-blindness, 4) some studies have failed to find any differences in Theory of Mind between autistic and non-autistic subjects, and 5) autistic strengths.
Rachel responds that, no, actually the E-S theory doesn't do any better at explaining these things. She thinks he totally misreads stimming, for one thing: to her, it's not about "systemizing" at all, it's about self-calming. It's a way to handle emotions, not a form of empirical investigation.
She also takes issue with his contention that we lack both cognitive and affective empathy:
His thinking has shifted somewhat since he wrote the paper Rachel was responding to; in that paper, he not only doesn't say that autistic people have affective empathy, but he also implies that we are deficient in both kinds of empathy --- he mentions the EQ as a measure of both affective and cognitive empathy, and also mentions that autistic people tend to score lower on the EQ than non-autistic people:
(I also think there is still a problem in Baron-Cohen's work with measuring empathy --- measuring it at all, much less measuring each component separately --- in that most of the tests he uses that directly measure some aspect of empathy, like the Sally-Anne test, the Faux Pas test, or the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, are measures of cognitive empathy only. The indirect measures, which are usually questionnaires, have their own problems. With any self-reported measures, there's a risk of stereotype threat, where the test takers' awareness of stereotypes about some group to which they belong biases their answers toward whatever the stereotype predicts: women/girls and members of some ethnic minorities, like African-Americans, Latin@s, or Native Americans, tend to do worse on math tests when they are reminded of their group membership, even by something as innocuous as a check-box at the top of the page for race and gender. Since autistic people are often taught from early childhood that their way of speaking, acting, feeling, or relating to other people is weird and wrong, I would not be surprised if they tended to rate themselves low on things like fitting in, participating in conversations or getting along with other people. Also, a lot of the questions on things like the EQ measure some mixture of cognitive and affective empathy; they ask about intuitively knowing what a person feels and then reacting to it, like knowing to comfort someone who is upset. There is one measure that has subscales geared just toward having intense feelings on other people's behalf, and that is the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, which one study found autistic people scored either very close to, or even better than, non-autistic people on all but one subscale.)
So his position on affective vs. cognitive empathy in autism has shifted somewhat since he wrote the paper Rachel was responding to, and he doesn't explicitly acknowledge that in his response to her; instead, he makes it sound like that's what he was saying all along:
(This seems like a really patronizing response to me. She has addressed theory of mind in other parts of her post; with the passage he's quoting, she is explicitly addressing the "emotional response" aspect of empathy. To make the point that her capacity to form an empathic emotional response is working just fine, thank you, she's describing that faculty in isolation. He ignores that context so that he can go, "Ah-ha, see, she has to be TOLD what someone is feeling!" Well, no, she doesn't always. She's just describing a particular scenario where her cognitive empathy cannot be called into question --- because she doesn't have to use it --- in order to focus on her affective empathy.)
No, I am glad he understands that we care about other people, too. I still disagree somewhat with his assessment of our difficulties with cognitive empathy; that, I think, stems as much from our being profoundly different from other people in terms of our sensory and emotional responses as it does from any objective inability to "read" other people. I think he ignores just how badly non-autistic people fail to notice the signs of our distress, or misinterpret our body language or tone of voice. I think they are just as bad at reading us as we are at reading them; it's just that because they're the majority, their failure to understand us is not as disabling as our failure to understand them.
I had more things I wanted to point out about his response to Rachel, but I've ended up spending so much time untangling this one little snag where they seem to be talking past each other that I think I will split this into multiple posts.
_________________________________________________
Sandrine (a French woman living in Turkey, who has an autistic son) at The Paris Ankara Express pointed me to this guest post by the famous autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen at the Autism Blogs Directory.
In his guest post, Prof. Baron-Cohen responds to criticism of his Empathizing-Systemizing (E-S) theory of autism from Rachel Cohen-Rottenburg, who writes the blog Journeys with Autism and also curates a web-anthology on Autism and Empathy.
He identifies ten points that Rachel makes in her essay, and writes a paragraph (or two or three) addressing each one. They seem to be split about half and half between questioning Baron-Cohen's conception of empathy (as in, autistic people actually tend to be quite sensitive to other people's emotions, particularly distress) and questioning whether his model is actually any more descriptive, or helpful, than older "deficit" models.
(You could argue --- and many people do --- that the E-S/Extreme Male Brain theory is still a deficit model since it considers a deficit in empathizing skills to be a defining characteristic of autism; it offsets this by also including normal or superior systemizing skills as part of the definition, but if you look at most of the psychological, educational, or behavioral literature on autism, you find all sorts of articles on remediating, or sounding the depths of, autistic deficits and not very much on nurturing or characterizing autistic strengths. So the offset deficit model isn't actually offset all that much, in practice.)
Rachel's post is a response to this paper from 2009 (Rachel's post is also from 2009) spelling out what the E-S theory says about autism. The article describes the E-S theory, particularly its evolution from Baron-Cohen's earlier "mindblindness" theory of autism. He lists five things the earlier model failed to explain that he thinks the newer one does adequately explain: 1) nonsocial aspects of autism, like attention to detail, love of patterns or routines, stimming etc., 2) empathy isn't just "mind-reading", it's also feeling something for the other person, and the "mindblindness" model only deals with mind-reading, 3) autism isn't the only condition that can produce mind-blindness, 4) some studies have failed to find any differences in Theory of Mind between autistic and non-autistic subjects, and 5) autistic strengths.
Rachel responds that, no, actually the E-S theory doesn't do any better at explaining these things. She thinks he totally misreads stimming, for one thing: to her, it's not about "systemizing" at all, it's about self-calming. It's a way to handle emotions, not a form of empirical investigation.
She also takes issue with his contention that we lack both cognitive and affective empathy:
The everyday experience of many autistic people, all across the spectrum, contradicts the professor's theory. Many of us experience such a high degree of empathy that we are constantly putting ourselves in other people's shoes and trying to see all sides in any controversy or conflict. Many of our problems with sensory and emotional overload derive from an excess of this ability, not a deficit.I feel like I have to back up now, because Prof. Baron-Cohen says explicitly in his response to her (he even draws a picture!) that he thinks autistic people are only impaired in cognitive empathy, and that we are just as capable of affective empathy as anybody, which is pretty close to what Rachel was saying, too.
...
From my contact with autistic people, it's clear to me that our empathy leads many of us to constantly question the impact of our words. While I am far from perfect, choosing my words carefully may very well rank as one of my Aspie obsessions. However, the professor believes that "the typical 9-year-old can figure out what might hurt another's feelings and what might therefore be better left unspoken. Children with Asperger syndrome are delayed by around 3 years in this skill." (Baron-Cohen, 69)
...
Baron-Cohen goes on to say that, in addition to not empathizing well, we don't know how to respond to someone even after the person tells us what's wrong.News flash: Once someone tells me how he or she feels, I don't usually have a problem with an empathetic response. Sometimes, I'll make sure that my response is welcome, out of respect for the other person's boundaries. For instance, if a person is crying, I might ask whether the person would like a hug, or whether the person would like to talk. Some people want hugs, and some people want to be left alone. I consider it courteous to ask. Once I know people fairly well, however, and I know what works for them, I simply respond. Just ask my husband, my daughter, my daughter's friends, my friends, my former co-workers, my neighbors, and all the animals I've ever helped care for in various stages of illness.
His thinking has shifted somewhat since he wrote the paper Rachel was responding to; in that paper, he not only doesn't say that autistic people have affective empathy, but he also implies that we are deficient in both kinds of empathy --- he mentions the EQ as a measure of both affective and cognitive empathy, and also mentions that autistic people tend to score lower on the EQ than non-autistic people:
Most people regard [Theory of Mind] as just the cognitive component of empathy in that it simply involves identifying someone else's (or your own) mental states. ... [M]issing from ToM is the second component of empathy, the response element: having an appropriate emotional reaction to another person's thoughts and feelings. This is referred to as affective empathy (Davis 1994). On the Empathy Quotient (EQ), a questionnaire is filled out either by an adult about themselves or by a parent about their child, both cognitive and affective empathy are assessed. On this scale, people with autism spectrum conditions score lower than comparison groups.So, while Rachel's objection --- yes, we do have affective empathy --- might seem redundant to someone who has read Baron-Cohen's more recent writing on the subject of empathy (his most recent book, Zero Degrees of Empathy, contrasts autistic people with psychopaths: the former group has poor cognitive empathy but normal affective empathy, while the latter has normal cognitive empathy but poor affective empathy), she is actually bringing up something that is not addressed in the text she's working with.
(I also think there is still a problem in Baron-Cohen's work with measuring empathy --- measuring it at all, much less measuring each component separately --- in that most of the tests he uses that directly measure some aspect of empathy, like the Sally-Anne test, the Faux Pas test, or the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test, are measures of cognitive empathy only. The indirect measures, which are usually questionnaires, have their own problems. With any self-reported measures, there's a risk of stereotype threat, where the test takers' awareness of stereotypes about some group to which they belong biases their answers toward whatever the stereotype predicts: women/girls and members of some ethnic minorities, like African-Americans, Latin@s, or Native Americans, tend to do worse on math tests when they are reminded of their group membership, even by something as innocuous as a check-box at the top of the page for race and gender. Since autistic people are often taught from early childhood that their way of speaking, acting, feeling, or relating to other people is weird and wrong, I would not be surprised if they tended to rate themselves low on things like fitting in, participating in conversations or getting along with other people. Also, a lot of the questions on things like the EQ measure some mixture of cognitive and affective empathy; they ask about intuitively knowing what a person feels and then reacting to it, like knowing to comfort someone who is upset. There is one measure that has subscales geared just toward having intense feelings on other people's behalf, and that is the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, which one study found autistic people scored either very close to, or even better than, non-autistic people on all but one subscale.)
So his position on affective vs. cognitive empathy in autism has shifted somewhat since he wrote the paper Rachel was responding to, and he doesn't explicitly acknowledge that in his response to her; instead, he makes it sound like that's what he was saying all along:
Rachel says "once someone tells me how he or she feels, I don't usually have a problem with an empathic response." This is exactly the point. For most people, they don't need to be told by the other person, "I am upset." They can just read this information in the other person's facial expression, vocal intonation, or 'body language', and they can make inferences about what the other person might be thinking, in the absence of being directly told. For many people with autism these non-verbal cues may be hard to read and instead they may only know how someone feels if they are told explicitly. The evidence for this again comes from many scientific studies documenting difficulties by people with autism in reading the mind in the eyes, the face, the voice, or in action (e.g., film). Rachel's own self-description seems consistent with this: "Now, I will readily admit that I cannot infer a person's mental state by reading nonverbal cues."
But I completely agree that once it is explicitly pointed out, people with autism are very capable of an empathic response. Rachel may be surprised to hear that I agree with her on this one, but it hinges on the distinction between 'cognitive' and 'affective' empathy. Cognitive empathy is the ability to identify another person's state of mind (not just through language) and affective empathy is the drive to respond with an appropriate emotion to another person's state of mind. A growing number of studies suggest that the empathy difficulties in autism are largely restricted to the cognitive component, whilst the affective component is often intact. For this reason, people with autism are often highly motivated not to upset others or hurt others, and are themselves upset to hear that they may have done this if it is pointed out. And once they know that someone else is upset or suffering, they are very often motivated to want to help or offer comfort.
(This seems like a really patronizing response to me. She has addressed theory of mind in other parts of her post; with the passage he's quoting, she is explicitly addressing the "emotional response" aspect of empathy. To make the point that her capacity to form an empathic emotional response is working just fine, thank you, she's describing that faculty in isolation. He ignores that context so that he can go, "Ah-ha, see, she has to be TOLD what someone is feeling!" Well, no, she doesn't always. She's just describing a particular scenario where her cognitive empathy cannot be called into question --- because she doesn't have to use it --- in order to focus on her affective empathy.)
No, I am glad he understands that we care about other people, too. I still disagree somewhat with his assessment of our difficulties with cognitive empathy; that, I think, stems as much from our being profoundly different from other people in terms of our sensory and emotional responses as it does from any objective inability to "read" other people. I think he ignores just how badly non-autistic people fail to notice the signs of our distress, or misinterpret our body language or tone of voice. I think they are just as bad at reading us as we are at reading them; it's just that because they're the majority, their failure to understand us is not as disabling as our failure to understand them.
I had more things I wanted to point out about his response to Rachel, but I've ended up spending so much time untangling this one little snag where they seem to be talking past each other that I think I will split this into multiple posts.
Monday, July 4, 2011
"Zero Degrees of Empathy" Link Roundup
I'm holding off until I've actually read Zero Degrees of Empathy (or, for the edition I'm most likely to get my hands on, The Science of Evil), but there are plenty of other people writing interesting things about it:
Lili Marlene, who lives in Australia and writes skeptically about psychology on her blog, Incorrect Pleasures, has written several posts about her thoughts on the book as she's been reading it.
Here they are in chronological order:
Just a little bit reductionist don't you think?
A very horrible story that can't be ignored
Mathematician's test score does not add up
A quick word or two regarding the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test and the Austrian study
Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, empathy expert
Is this guy for real? Baron-Cohen's latest book is a real urban legend!
Indigo Jo has written a double review of Zero Degrees of Empathy and an earlier book on E-S Theory, The Essential Difference. (And Lisa Harney at Questioning Transphobia has enlarged on it; the comment thread on her post is also worth reading).
Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg has a very detailed post about empathy; she has also started a web-anthology of essays addressing myths about autistic people and our capacity for empathy.
On Tumblr (a platform which continues to confuse me, but which is apparently really popular), Emily posted at F*** Yeah Autism Spectrum: So I read the first chapter of Simon Baron-Cohen's new book
Monday, June 13, 2011
Beyond Good and Evil: Does Simon Baron-Cohen's E-S Theory Help Us Understand Why People Do Bad Things?
I found out from browsing Sarah's Tumblr (which I do not regularly read like I used to read her blog, because I find Tumblr annoying, confusing and unreadable with its text-overlapping-text and other format wonkiness*) that Kim Wombles, who writes Countering Age of Autism, has interviewed Simon Baron-Cohen for a website called Science 2.0.
The occasion for this interview is that Baron-Cohen has apparently written a new book, one that extends his ideas about empathizing and systemizing from their usual territory (autism, psychological sex differences) to relatively new ground (explaining the human capacity for antisocial acts).
The American edition of the book is called The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty, and it's reviewed at length (also by Kim Wombles!) here.
I haven't read the book, so I won't bother critiquing it without knowing what it actually says, but I will reproduce some of Wombles's Q&A with Baron-Cohen.
(And yay for him pointing out the difference between cognitive and emotional empathy, and also for pointing out that autistic people can be very emotionally empathic! That often gets lost, even in his own previous discussions of this subject.)
Also, I'm just going to express my skepticism at the idea that most of the abusive state employees described in the New York Times stories I referenced in this post had any psychiatric diagnoses, much less diagnoses that would explain their startling lack of empathy for the developmentally disabled people in their care. While Baron-Cohen does mention that failures of empathy can occur in people whose faculties are theoretically intact, he doesn't go into detail about how this happens. I guess I'll have to read the book to see what kind of case he makes that there is an "empathy circuit" in the brain that is bypassed or otherwise disabled when a person acts in a nasty way toward other people.
Finally, the "moral code[s] based on 'fairness' and 'justice'" that autistic people are supposed to develop through our amazing abilities to reason logically and think abstractly, sound a lot like the "mental widgets" that are so baffling to Amanda Baggs, and to (what seems to be) a significant subset of other autistic/non-neurotypical people! So I very much doubt that *all* of us are intellectualizing our way toward a system of ethics, even if I were to grant that some of us do that.
*I am a living refutation of the common stereotype that being autistic automatically makes you technologically gifted. Oh, how I wish!
The occasion for this interview is that Baron-Cohen has apparently written a new book, one that extends his ideas about empathizing and systemizing from their usual territory (autism, psychological sex differences) to relatively new ground (explaining the human capacity for antisocial acts).
The American edition of the book is called The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty, and it's reviewed at length (also by Kim Wombles!) here.
I haven't read the book, so I won't bother critiquing it without knowing what it actually says, but I will reproduce some of Wombles's Q&A with Baron-Cohen.
KW: Do you think readers will potentially ... get confused as to why you've placed the ASDs in a book titled The Science of Evil?Right now, I'm going to restrict myself to a few brief, superficial comments: first, in response to Professor Baron-Cohen's contention that everyone who says they are autistic on the Internet is a highly verbal, high-IQ computer geek with Asperger's --- no, we're not. There's a wide variety of autistic people on the Internet, including people with all sorts of functioning labels. The format of the Internet itself actually makes it easier for the less verbal, likely-to-be-called-low-functioning autistics to participate, since they don't have to produce speech. We might not be represented on the Internet in the exact proportions that we exist in the real world, but neither do we all belong to the same narrow subcategory of autism.
SBC: ... [Z]ero degrees of empathy does not necessarily lead to acts of cruelty. In the case of people with autism spectrum conditions, their low empathy usually leads them to avoid other people because they find other people confusing. Their low empathy doesn't lead them to commit acts of cruelty any more than anyone else in the population, but it does often lead them to feel socially isolated, with the added risk of depression.
...
The key difference [between autistics and psychopaths] seems to be that in psychopaths the 'cognitive' component of empathy is intact but the 'affective' component is not. In autism, both components may be impaired, or just the cognitive component. But their strong systemizing leads them, through powerful logic, to develop a moral code based on 'fairness' and 'justice'. Psychopaths lack the moral compass that most people develop using their empathy, and lack the moral compass that people with autism develop using their strong systemizing. People with autism spectrum conditions often end up as 'super-moral', developing a set of rules they expect people to live up to consistently (such as honesty), arriving at the conclusion that one should 'treat others as you would have others treat you' because it is the most logical approach.
...
KW: The online autism community is very vocal (and fairly well in agreement, considering the wide divides usually tearing it apart) that you are incorrect in your belief that autistic people lack empathy (and theory of mind). How do you respond to that charge and what evidence do you have that people with ASDs have zero empathy?
SBC: The online autism community is just one sector of the autistic population: namely, those with at least average intelligence, who can therefore use the internet. They are sometimes referred to as having "high-functioning autism" or Asperger Syndrome. This sector of the autistic population may not have zero degrees of empathy, but they do tend to have below average levels of empathy on different measures that research[ers] have used. These include (but are not restricted to) the 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' Test, or the Empathy Quotient (EQ).
Many people with autism in the remainder of the spectrum may well have absolutely zero degrees of empathy, as shown in failing the False Belief Test (theory of mind) that even a typical 4 year old child can pass, but which is failed by many children with autism with a mental age above 4 years old. Many may not even show 'joint attention' that even a typical 18 month old toddler can show, such as spontaneously following another person's gaze. A meta-analysis review of false belief studies by Francesca Happe in 1995 found that most children with autism take until the age of 11 years old to pass this test, which is a 7 year delay (see attached graph and the recent paper by Senju, 2011). Even among children with Asperger Syndrome or high functioning autism, delays in 'social sensitivity' (such as detecting faux pas) are seen, despite their average or above average IQ.
...
So why might people with autism in the online community challenge this view? One possibility is that it is in the nature of empathy that people who are low in empathy are often the last people to be aware of it. ... An analogy might be with colour blindness. Many people who are colour blind are the last people to know about it, until they are given a test of it by an optician or vision scientist. They simply assumed that they were seeing the same colours as everyone else.
...
In my experience whilst even adults with Asperger Syndrome may have difficulties figuring out why someone else's remark was considered funny, or why their own remark was considered rude, or may judge others as liars when they simply are inconsistent in not doing what they said they would do, they may nevertheless have a highly developed emotional empathy, caring about how someone feels and not wanting to hurt them. If they do hurt them it is often unintentional and they feel mortified when it is pointed out, and want to rectify this. In this respect, they do have some of the components of empathy.
Many people with autism also form very strong emotional relationships with their pets ... whilst they struggle to 'read' human behaviour and human intentions, they can read the arguably more predictable behaviour of a pet.
(And yay for him pointing out the difference between cognitive and emotional empathy, and also for pointing out that autistic people can be very emotionally empathic! That often gets lost, even in his own previous discussions of this subject.)
Also, I'm just going to express my skepticism at the idea that most of the abusive state employees described in the New York Times stories I referenced in this post had any psychiatric diagnoses, much less diagnoses that would explain their startling lack of empathy for the developmentally disabled people in their care. While Baron-Cohen does mention that failures of empathy can occur in people whose faculties are theoretically intact, he doesn't go into detail about how this happens. I guess I'll have to read the book to see what kind of case he makes that there is an "empathy circuit" in the brain that is bypassed or otherwise disabled when a person acts in a nasty way toward other people.
Finally, the "moral code[s] based on 'fairness' and 'justice'" that autistic people are supposed to develop through our amazing abilities to reason logically and think abstractly, sound a lot like the "mental widgets" that are so baffling to Amanda Baggs, and to (what seems to be) a significant subset of other autistic/non-neurotypical people! So I very much doubt that *all* of us are intellectualizing our way toward a system of ethics, even if I were to grant that some of us do that.
*I am a living refutation of the common stereotype that being autistic automatically makes you technologically gifted. Oh, how I wish!
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Fetal Testosterone and Autistic Traits - Part V(a): More About Visuospatial Abilities
(An addendum to my earlier post on this topic)
Looking back at this article (full text here), I notice something I didn't write about in my earlier (as yet unpublished) post about it --- one of the things its authors were testing for, looking to see if it had any relation to how much testosterone they found in their study participants' mothers' amniotic fluid, was IQ (measured using the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence, or WASI).
More importantly, the researchers also tracked their subjects' scores on one particular subscale of the Wechsler test --- Block Design --- which has been shown over and over again to be something autistic people are very, very good at.
Not only are we better, overall, than non-autistic people are at this task, we also score much higher on it than we do on any other subscale of a Wechsler IQ test.
Our scores, when you plot them across all the different subscales, tend to show this characteristic pattern, of a valley on the (verbal) Comprehension subscale and a very high peak on the Block Design subscale:
(Figure 5, in Shah and Frith, 1993; both solid lines represent groups of autistic children --- the line connecting unfilled circles represents autistic children with high overall IQs, while the line connecting darkened circles represents autistic children with low overall IQs. Dotted lines represent various non-autistic groups: children with intellectual disability but not autism, children without disabilities, and teenagers without disabilities)
Auyeung, B., Baron-Cohen, S., Ashwin, E., Knickmeyer, R., Taylor, K., & Hackett, G. (2009). Fetal testosterone and autistic traits British Journal of Psychology, 100 (1), 1-22 DOI: 10.1348/000712608X311731
Dawson, M., Soulieres, I., Ann Gernsbacher, M., & Mottron, L. (2007). The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence Psychological Science, 18 (8), 657-662 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01954.x
Shah, A., & Frith, U. (1993). Why Do Autistic Individuals Show Superior Performance on the Block Design Task? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 34 (8), 1351-1364 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.1993.tb02095.x
Looking back at this article (full text here), I notice something I didn't write about in my earlier (as yet unpublished) post about it --- one of the things its authors were testing for, looking to see if it had any relation to how much testosterone they found in their study participants' mothers' amniotic fluid, was IQ (measured using the Wechsler Abbreviated Scale of Intelligence, or WASI).
More importantly, the researchers also tracked their subjects' scores on one particular subscale of the Wechsler test --- Block Design --- which has been shown over and over again to be something autistic people are very, very good at.
Not only are we better, overall, than non-autistic people are at this task, we also score much higher on it than we do on any other subscale of a Wechsler IQ test.
Our scores, when you plot them across all the different subscales, tend to show this characteristic pattern, of a valley on the (verbal) Comprehension subscale and a very high peak on the Block Design subscale:
(Image adapted from Figure 1 in Dawson et al., 2007; each square along the line represents a different subscale of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children - Third Edition)
Here is another image, from a much older study, showing the difference between the distribution across the different subscales of a Wechsler test of autistic and non-autistic test-takers' scores.
(Figure 5, in Shah and Frith, 1993; both solid lines represent groups of autistic children --- the line connecting unfilled circles represents autistic children with high overall IQs, while the line connecting darkened circles represents autistic children with low overall IQs. Dotted lines represent various non-autistic groups: children with intellectual disability but not autism, children without disabilities, and teenagers without disabilities)The peaked shape is present in both the low-overall-IQ and high-overall-IQ autistic groups, while both the low- and high-IQ controls' scores are more or less the same across all the subscales.
So, if more testosterone in the womb ---> autistic-like brains, you would expect 1) boys to score higher than girls on this task, 2) boys to show greater disparity between Block Design scores and other scores, 3) both absolute and relative Block Design scores to correlate with fetal testosterone within each sex.
As raw scores for each subscale of the WASI were not given in Auyeung et al., 2009, I can't tell anything about whether their subjects' Block Design scores were particularly high relative to the other subscales.
However, I can tell you that there were no sex differences on Block Design --- boys' average score was 19.14 to girls' 16.26, but the standard deviation for both sexes is probably somewhere between 9.5 and 10*, making the difference between the sexes a little less than one-third of a standard deviation, and thus not statistically significant.
Also, within each sex, amniotic testosterone had no relationship to any of the IQ measures the researchers reported --- not full-scale IQ, not verbal IQ, not performance IQ and not the Block Design subscale of performance IQ.
So, this cognitive ability characteristic of autism doesn't seem to vary with sex or with androgenicity.
*Standard deviations are only given for boys and girls separately; for boys, it is 9.41; for girls, 10.08. There are 43 boys and 31 girls in this study population.
Auyeung, B., Baron-Cohen, S., Ashwin, E., Knickmeyer, R., Taylor, K., & Hackett, G. (2009). Fetal testosterone and autistic traits British Journal of Psychology, 100 (1), 1-22 DOI: 10.1348/000712608X311731
Dawson, M., Soulieres, I., Ann Gernsbacher, M., & Mottron, L. (2007). The Level and Nature of Autistic Intelligence Psychological Science, 18 (8), 657-662 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.01954.x
Shah, A., & Frith, U. (1993). Why Do Autistic Individuals Show Superior Performance on the Block Design Task? Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 34 (8), 1351-1364 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.1993.tb02095.x
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Fetal Testosterone and Autistic Traits - Part V: Visuospatial Abilities
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Researchers looking into the separate questions, "How do male and female minds differ?" and "How do autistic people differ from non-autistic people?" have discovered --- independently of each other --- an assortment of cognitive strengths peculiar to each of the groups being studied. Now that Simon Baron-Cohen has floated the idea that autism is just an extreme version of the normal male brain, it would make sense to check if the cognitive strengths of autistic people, and of all men, really do overlap, and whether prenatal testosterone exposure seems to play any role in the development of any of those aptitudes.One recent study (Falter et al., 2008) compared groups of autistic and typically developing schoolchildren on three visual/spatial tasks that normally show a male advantage: mentally rotating three-dimensional objects, positioning a cursor over a moving image, and spotting a shape hidden somewhere in a larger pattern or line drawing, or "figure disembedding". They also measured the children's second-to-fourth digit ratios, as an indicator of prenatal testosterone exposure.
Their results were not consistent with what they predicted based on the extreme-male-brain theory of autism: the autistic children did better at figure disembedding, worse at targeting the moving image, and were slightly faster (but not more accurate) at mental rotation. On further analysis, though, they seemed to be faster at different parts of the (complex, multi-step) mental-rotation process than non-autistic men seem to be. The researchers were able to break down the results of the mental-rotation task into "rotational" and "non-rotational" components --- that is, to separate the actual visualization of the object rotating from the other factors, like comparing the rotated object in your head to the one shown on the screen and deciding whether they are the same. Autistic people seem to be faster at the non-rotational parts of this process, while non-autistic, male people seem to be faster at the rotational part. So, different cognitive skills underlie the two groups' respective advantages at the same complex task.
Finally, testosterone seemed to play no role whatsoever in predicting a child's success at either mental rotation or figure disembedding; the only task that showed a relationship between digit ratios and performance on that task was targeting, which 1) was harder for the supposedly "hyper-masculine" autistic boys, and 2) was easiest for the boys with middling digit ratios --- the ones with very low, "masculinized" digit ratios performed worse, as did the ones with high, "feminized" digit ratios. There were also no group differences in digit ratio between autistic and non-autistic boys.
________________________________________
The term "visuospatial abilities" covers a lot of ground, and might include different skill sets depending on where and how it's being used.
For example, one of the most-studied (and most reliably replicated) cognitive differences between the sexes is a male advantage in the ability to rotate three-dimensional images on one's head; other spatial skills that tend to show a male advantage are aiming, predicting a projectile's trajectory . If autism is the same thing as having an "extreme male brain," you would expect autistic people to do better at these tasks than non-autistic people of their same gender.
There is also a well-established constellation of visual and spatial skills that autistic people tend to be better at than non-autistic people: the Block Design subscale of the Weschler intelligence tests, spotting a shape hidden inside a larger pattern (i.e., disembedding a figure), distinguishing a target figure from a crowd of "distractor figures" that are similar but not identical to the target, and reproducing a distorted or impossible image. It would be equally instructive, as far as investigating the extreme-male-brain hypothesis is concerned, to look for sex differences in how non-autistic people do on these tasks; you would also want to look for a relationship between those abilities and prenatal testosterone exposure. If the autistic cognitive style is essentially the same as the masculine one, you would predict exposure to higher levels of testosterone in utero would correlate with higher scores on the Block Design, faster and more accurate performance on visual-search tasks (like the Embedded Figures test or the tasks described in this study), and greater accuracy on drawing tasks, like the perspective-drawing task described here or the shape-drawing task described here (PDF).
One relatively recent study, carried out by Christine Falter, Kate Plaisted and Greg Davis and published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, directly addresses the prediction I made in the second paragraph. Those researchers identified three visuo-spatial tasks that usually show a male advantage (or correlate with prenatal testosterone exposure, or both) --- mental rotation, targeting and figure-disembedding --- and tested a group of 28 autistic schoolchildren (27 of whom were boys) and a group of 31 typically-developing children matched for age, sex and nonverbal IQ on those tasks. They also measured the children's second-to-fourth digit ratio, as an indirect measure of prenatal testosterone exposure.
(Sample image from the Embedded Figures Test)
They found no significant differences between the autistic children and the typically-developing children in terms of digit ratio; depending on how the study participants were grouped (because each skill was tested in a differently-sized subset of the total study population), either the autistic half or the neurotypical half of a given subgroup might have slightly higher 2D:4D. These differences were so slight as to be statistically insignificant, regardless.
Overall, the autistic children did better at both mental rotation of 3-D objects (measured by having the children turn a computer-generated image of a solid to match the view of that solid the computer showed them) and figure disembedding than the typically-developing children; they were both faster and more accurate at these tasks. (Although, for the mental-rotation task, the difference was very slight). However, they performed worse than the typically-developing children at the targeting task, in which they had to position a cursor over an image that would appear at random points within certain regions of the computer screen*. Also, the mental-rotation results are a bit more complicated than just looking at the mean reaction times and accuracies of both groups would lead you to believe. The study authors did a linear regression of each of those two outcome variables with the degree of rotation (i.e., how far from its original position did the participants have to rotate the object?), which apparently allowed them to separate out the different cognitive processes used in mental rotation:
Only the linear regression for reaction time showed any difference between the autistic and typically-developing groups, and there the difference was only in the intercept; the slopes of the two groups' lines were more or less the same.Across participants, the degree of rotation showed a strong linear relationship with reaction time, RT (R = .99, F(1,3) = 227.88, p = .001), and accuracy scores, ACC
(R = .98, F(1,3) = 59.84, p = .004). Accordingly, consistent with previous studies of mental rotation, RT and ACC were each regressed linearly against angle of rotation for each participant, to yield a rotation slope and an intercept. The slope for each participant indexed the speed with which they mentally "rotated" objects in degrees per second. The intercept yielded by these regressions indexed non-rotational aspects of performance, presumably related to the speed with which participants mentally compare three-dimensional objects as well as decision making and response variables.
(Figure 1, in Falter et al., 2008 --- graph showing the linear relationship of degree of rotation with reaction time)Since two of the three authors of this paper (Falter and Davis) had also been involved in a similar study comparing men and women, using the same linear-regression method in their analysis of their results, they were in a position to notice differences between the men's results in the 2006 study and the autistic children's results from the 2008 study.
While both of the studies found overall differences that seem to lend support to Baron-Cohen's hypothesis --- men outperformed women, and autistic boys** outperformed typically-developing boys --- the linear regressions of both sets of data revealed different factors contributing to each better-performing group's advantage: while the autistic group in Falter et al. (2008) seemed to be better at the non-rotational aspects of this task, the male group in Falter et al. (2006) was faster at performing the rotations themselves. (In other words, if you were to compare the graphs made of the linear regressions of their results, the graphs in the 2006 study would have different slopes, while the graphs in the 2008 study have about the same slope, but different intercepts).
(Figure 2, in Falter et al., 2008 --- graph showing relationship of second-to-fourth digit ratio to reaction time on Targeting task)Neither the mental-rotation task nor the figure-disembedding task showed any relationship to digit ratio; however, there was a quadratic relationship between 2D:4D and reaction time on the targeting task, with children having both very high (above 1.0) and very low (below 0.90) digit ratios taking longer to position the cursor correctly than their peers with mid-range digit ratios.
An older study, carried out in 1992 by Jo-Anne Finegan, G. Alison Niccols, and Gabriel Sitarenios, compared testosterone levels in the amniotic fluid of women who had undergone amniocentesis at Toronto General Hospital during the mid-1980s with those women's children's later results (at age four, in this study) on a wide range of cognitive tests.
The visuospatial tasks included in this study were fairly similar to the ones Falter, Plaisted and Davis used: there was a figure-disembedding task (the Preschool Embedded Figures Test, in which a triangle is hidden somewhere in various line drawings of familiar objects), a block-building task, in which the person giving the test builds structures of varying complexity out of 1-inch cubes, and the child is supposed to build the same thing. It's not the same as the Block Design test, but it seems pretty close to it to me. The one thing Falter et al. test that Finegan et al. do not is targeting, and Finegan et al. test a few things Falter et al. don't: picture-puzzle solving (which I guess is also analogous to Block Design) and geometric-form copying (analogous to the drawing tasks I mentioned above, in the paragraph about autistic people's visuospatial strengths).
(Sample image from the Preschool Embedded Figures Test)
That study found no significant sex differences in any of the skills being investigated; it also found no relationship between prenatal testosterone and performance of three of the four tasks I describe above --- figure disembedding, puzzle solving and shape drawing were all independent of prenatal testosterone exposure in both sexes. For girls, there was a significant negative relationship between prenatal testosterone and scores on the block-building task --- the higher female scorers on this test tended to have lower levels of prenatal testosterone exposure than their lower-scoring peers; for boys, there was a small trend in the opposite direction --- with high scorers tending to have higher prenatal testosterone levels --- but that relationship wasn't statistically significant.
Falter et al.'s results tell me that the area of overlap between 1) the things men are usually found to better at than women, and 2) the things that autistic people are usually found to be better at than non-autistic people, within the larger domain of visuo-spatial skills, is fairly small. Also, the two "masculine" skills that autistic people tend to do better at --- figure disembedding and mental rotation --- are not at all correlated with an indirect measure of prenatal androgen exposure.
Because there is some uncertainty around the use of digit ratios as a marker for prenatal testosterone exposure, I wanted to find a study of similar cognitive abilities that measured that variable directly. Finegan et al.'s study was the only one I could find that did this, even though it was old and didn't have any autistic participants. Their results showed that prenatal testosterone has no effect on young children's performance at most visuospatial tasks, and, on the tasks it does influence, it seems to affect boys and girls differently, with higher levels of testosterone exposure boosting boys' scores but lowering girls'.
*It doesn't surprise me at all that autistic people would be slower at that, given our difficulties with motor planning. Even apart from that, some studies have found that we are not as good as neurotypical people in tracking moving visual stimuli --- see this review (full text here) for more detail.
**I use "boys" here because there were a total of two girls --- one in the autistic group, and the other in the control group --- in this study population of fifty-nine children.
Sources:
Falter CM, Plaisted KC, & Davis G (2008). Visuo-spatial processing in autism--testing the predictions of extreme male brain theory. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 38 (3), 507-515 PMID: 17674175
Finegan, J., Niccols, G., & Sitarenios, G. (1992). Relations between prenatal testosterone levels and cognitive abilities at 4 years. Developmental Psychology, 28 (6), 1075-1089 DOI: 10.1037/0012-1649.28.6.1075
Voyer D, Voyer S, & Bryden MP (1995). Magnitude of sex differences in spatial abilities: a meta-analysis and consideration of critical variables. Psychological bulletin, 117 (2), 250-270 PMID: 7724690
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