Monday, March 18, 2013

Reading the Mind in the Eyes

Taking the Eyes Test is an interesting way to spend a few minutes on the internet. You might want to take the test first, and then read about it below.


Is this person playful, comforting, irritated, or bored?




Here is a paper on the Eyes Test by Simon Baron-Cohen, who has been doing the most intriguing research in autism these past couple of decades.


"In a broad autism phenotype study, parents of children with autism spectrum disorders performed more poorly than comparison participants (Baron-Cohen and Hammer, ). In a series of subsequent studies aimed at examining individual differences in mentalizing among healthy adults, Baron-Cohen and colleagues demonstrated that the Eyes Test, in conjunction with other measures, discriminates between individuals with a propensity for humanities from individuals with a physical sciences orientation (Billington et al., )."

Peterson and Miller (2012) found that performance on the Eyes Test was better predicted by Verbal IQ (WASI vocab; TLC figurative language) than by facial processing (CFMT), which calls into doubt just what the test is actually measuring:


Table 2
 
 
 
I will be posting more in the future about the work of Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen. I'm a far bigger fan of his than I am of his cousin. A profile worth reading is here.
 

 
 

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