New APPS

Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science. Mostly Philosophy.

recent posts

about

    Simon Baron-Cohen’s Autism-Spectrum Quotient test

    Simon is comedian Sacha-Baron Cohen's (AKA Ali G., Borat, Bruno) brother, and also does philosophically interesting work on psychopathy.

    Wired has the test HERE.

    What's interesting about the test is that 80% of the people who scored 32 or above then went on to pass other diagnostic tests for what's now called Autism Spectrum Disorder. Pretty impressive for a test consisting of 50 questions involving this kind of self-reporting.

    In any case, this is a good excuse to revel in Simon's brother flummoxing (recently incarcerated) evolution denier Kent Hovind at right. One can score pretty high on Simon's test and still find this kind of thing hilarious.

    Posted in

    19 responses to “Simon Baron-Cohen’s Autism-Spectrum Quotient test”

    1. Mike Jacovides Avatar
      Mike Jacovides

      Cousin–it would be too weird if they were brothers.

      Like

      Reply
    2. Neil Avatar
      Neil

      He has also written an awful book on men and women’s brains. Influential and utterly toxic.

      Like

      Reply
    3. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      I’m also worried that he’s not far enough away from the whole pernicious tradition of trying to explaining autism in terms of the autistic’s supposed inability to track other people’s mental states (though this misunderstanding was really important for getting him to later understand an essential component of psychopathy0*. The manner in which autism is misunderstood here infected hundreds of articles in the philosophy of mind during the heydey of theory-theory versus simulationism debates, and from what I can tell influenced about a fifth of the questions on the Cohen’s survey.
      From reading Temple Grandin and other sources, it’s pretty clear to me that many of the people getting put even very far along the autism spectrum do not have the supposed deficit. Many autistics (paradigmatically Grandin) are simply from a very young age massively overwhelmed by various types of sensory stimulation that they detect much more than normals, and all of the weird behaviors that seems to manifest an inability to understand other’s minds are in fact just the effect of various coping strategies to deal with the overstimulation that results from not filtering out all of the sensory details.
      I also confidently predict that many autistics’ superhuman abilities to notice such fine details and notice so much actually give some autistics a radically increased ability to “mind read.”
      It might be the case that there are two or more different things being grouped together into ASD. This has happened recently with “dyslexia,” where 20% to a third of them are now known to have issues based in problems with spatial perception strangely connected to ADHD type issues, and the rest have issues stemming from early deficits in phonological perception. Grandin herself discovered that some dyslexics (I think of the former type) have many issues in common with people on the Autism Spectrum and can often differentiate sensory stimuli that other people can’t. One of her dyslexic students can tell what’s playing on a radio even when the radio is off. From the context, it seemed clear to me that (like Grandin) the student is good in her research because she can notice things that animals notice that normal humans don’t.
      When I read about Grandin’s dyslexic graduate student, it hit home with me (scored 32 on Baron-Cohen’s test) because I have this weird ability to smell bacteria. For example, strep throat has an absolutely distinctive smell that very few people seem to pick up, and I can tell when food is going to go bad hours before anyone else can smell the bacteria that has just began to consume it. When I go to a place with an overwhelming amount of intrusive stimulation like the Atlantic Airport (e.g. loop tape of music, moronic CNN with ridiculously boosted bass frequencies (to get through noise cancelling headphones) from all the televisions, people talking on cell phones, moronic sports televisions from the restaurants, the beeping of those little cars, constant announcements over the PA system, incompetent architecture leading bad acoustics to amplifying normal conversations in weird ways, etc. etc. etc.) I have to take Xanax**. From Grandin’s descriptions, being autistic is like being overstimulated by an American Airport all the time, which strikes me as pretty horrifying. As a result, Grandin takes anti-anxiety medication all the time, and this has been an incredible help for her.
      The kind of obsessive learning and engineering type tasks that lots of autistics get into is I think also a pretty good response to constant overstimulation. If you can really focus on a piece of computer code (or some seemingly weird thing like the relative locations and durations of quite moment in the entire set of Motown songs), then everything else disappears for a while. I suspect that academics’ higher scoring on tests ASD is in part a result of this, as well as academics’ much greater likelihood of having full blown autistic children.
      It’s not at all implausible to think that self-reporting of someone like Grandin is going to change the scientific understanding of the disease. This happened fairly recently with our understanding of schizophrenia after John Nash re-emerged to accept the Nobel Prize. As Nasser recounts in her biography, the accepted understanding of schizophrenia prior to that was that it was a degenerative disease that nobody got better from. But after Nash’s re-emergence and the recognition that he’d been doing new math (computational number theory) for some time, to their credit psychologists realized that the standard textbooks were radically mistaken. After some pioneering research they realized that the only reason they had thought schizophrenia degenerated into catatonia is because the people whose symptoms became manageable had all dropped out of the mental health system and gotten on with their lives. If I remember the Nasser book correctly, this was over 40% of diagnosed schizophrenics!
      Reading Grandin’s book while reading philosophers of mind discuss the autistic literature in the “theory of mind” debate is just as grating as reading about Nash and reading twenty year old psychology textbooks on schizophrenia. But I don’t think philosophers are hugely blameworthy here, because they were just reflecting a clinical consensus arrived at by not listening to what high functioning autistics have to say about what it is like to be autistic.
      [Notes:
      Unlike autistics, psychopaths *really are missing something in their theory of mind. A psychopath understands if you get mad if he hurts you, but at some level a psychopath just doesn’t get it when you get mad if they hurt someone else. Ken Levy has some fascinating work on what the legal ramifications might be for this, arguing that criminal psychopaths do understand contracts and so should be legally though not morally liable for harm they cause. This has both legal ramifications and non-trivial ramifications with respect to social contract theory as a foundation of ethics as well.
      **A significant amount of normal people hate the Atlanta airport for the same reasons; many resort to paying for quiet in the various club lounges or anesthetizing themselves with several stiff drinks; slate dot com’s “ask a pilot” author notes that pilots both overwhelmingly hate the Atlanta airport for its noise issues and overwhelmingly love European and Asian airports for their meditative qualities, as opposed to American ones that are impossible for many of them to rest between flights in.]

      Like

      Reply
    4. John Protevi Avatar
      John Protevi

      Hi Jon, that’s a great comment, worthy of a post all for itself.
      I remember the day I decided to pay to join the Delta Sky Club program: a Sunday afternoon coming home, layover in Atlanta (ATL), early December, so on top of everything were Christmas carols. To this day I wonder if Delta kicks back some of their Sky Club revenue to the ATL management for their production of that over-stimulating environment.

      Like

      Reply
    5. Neil Levy Avatar
      Neil Levy

      Can’t respond properly right now, Jon – sudden influx of urgent work – but I was wondering if you have references? I’m no specialist on autism, but I have never heard anyone claim that autism is not characterized by a theory of mind deficit. OTOH, I am quite knowledgeable about psychopathy; the standard view is that psychopaths have normal theory of mind.

      Like

      Reply
    6. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Neil,
      All of the works by Temple Grandin dispute the normal claim. For her everything else is ultimately the result of sensory overload, and she ties her own undisputed mammoth practical and academic achievements in animal science to her greater understanding of animal minds than normal humans have. She’s actually designed over half of the cattle slaughter houses in the United States now, because she knows how to design them where in the cattle shoots the cows don’t at any point panic. This is a huge deal for the beef industry because when they cows panic: (1) they jump and the meat bruises, (2) they refuse to move forward and have to be electrically prodded (dangerous and slow), and (2) their adrenalin levels shoot way up which can be bad for the meat.
      I should have been clearer about my usage. You’re using “theory of mind” in the narrower way that philosophers of mind do as predicting behavior from beliefs and desires.
      Much of the legal literature around psychopathology involves the extent to which their lack of of empathy undermines their ability to understand moral reasoning. If this is true (and there is very good reason documented in a large literature to think that it is), then there is a huge prima facie problem for our standard understanding of legal culpability, which typically is understood to require exactly the kind of understanding psychopaths lack. Ken Levy’s work is extraordinarily important in American legal theory in this regard (see http://works.bepress.com/ken_levy2/doctype.html ).
      I think Levy’s work is incredibly philosophically interesting, independently of whether one uses the phrase “theory of mind” in the narrow sense one sometimes gets from philosophers’ more standard focus on the relation between beliefs/desires and actions.
      This being said, the kind of empathy (and resulting abilities non-psychopaths have) should I think be included by any serious defender of “theory of mind” as opposed to other approaches like simulationism. But that’s orthogonal to anything I said above, and in any case I worry that the whole debate is misconceived for many of the very reasons that the theory of minder needs to accommodate the interactions between empathy and propositional understanding. But again, that’s orthogonal to what standard approaches to autism are missing, and how this lacunae may or may not have led to Baron-Cohen’s fascinating new research.

      Like

      Reply
    7. Anonymous Avatar
      Anonymous

      The question is partly etiological: is the observed difficulty with mind-reading a product of prior, independent problems of sensory processing?
      Victoria McGeer at Princeton has done philosophical work on related questions.

      Like

      Reply
    8. Matt Avatar
      Matt

      Baron-Cohen’s work on women is noxious enough to make me look at his other work with a very skeptical eye. But, on the psychopath question, let me also recommend this paper by my friend and former grad-school colleague Paul Litton, a legal philosopher at Missouri.
      http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1310886
      It’s a few years old, and things change in this area quickly sometimes, but I learned a huge amount from it, and think it deserves more attention from philosophers.

      Like

      Reply
    9. Neil Levy Avatar
      Neil Levy

      I’m pretty sure that I’m using ToM in the standard way in cognitive science. It concerns what mental states people have, not whether one has some kind of emotional response to those mental states. Of course you’re free to include empathy in ToM, as long as you’re clear that’s what you’re doing (and you are). There is some evidence, though, that psychopaths don’t even have a deficit with empathy: they have a deficit (if that’s what it is) with caring about people’s suffering, not understanding it (see Aharoni et al. 2011). I am actually on the other side of this debate – the Levy side (of course) – but the case is not clear cut. I think it quite likely that ASD is more than one condition (for any x, where x is in the DSM, it is likely that X is more than one condition).

      Like

      Reply
    10. Neil Levy Avatar
      Neil Levy

      the question seems a good one and the answer implied seems plausible. But that’s not Jon’s view: he is denying that there are ToM deficits, not that these deficits are not basic.

      Like

      Reply
    11. Neil Levy Avatar
      Neil Levy

      In case anyone’s interested, here’s my review of Baron-Cohen’s book on sex differences:
      http://philpapers.org/rec/LEVBRU

      Like

      Reply
    12. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      I’m sorry if I wasn’t careful enough in the original comment. I think that we agree more than disagree.
      The original comment said, “all of the weird behaviors that seems to manifest an inability to understand other’s minds are in fact just the effect of various coping strategies to deal with the overstimulation that results from not filtering out all of the sensory details.” I took this to be consistent with McGreer’s work.
      What got you is the “seems to.” I used it for three reasons. (1) With your comment that “(for any x, where x is in the DSM, it is likely that X is more than one condition)” I also originally noted that “Autism Spectrum Disorder” is almost certainly as crude as our earlier understanding of Dyslexia and that once we understand the etiology better, I think we are going to see that there was more than one disorder being lumped together, (I predict the same thing will happen with Parkinson’s precisely because Parkinson’s Plus sufferers are in the relevant ways analogous to autistics like Grandin and dyslexics like her student and me).
      (2) Related to the previous parenthetical, I used the cautionary “seem to manifest.” I think that some people who score very high on all of the other autism markers have no theory of mind deficits, which strengthens McGreer’s claim considerably. The original problem concerns sensory processing and this sometimes might actually lead to deficits which it is useful to describe as theory of mind deficits, sometimes leads to deficits we are misdescribing because of bad philosophy (broady construed), and sometimes doesn’t at all. On this third part, nobody doubts that Temple Grandin was correctly diagnosed as far, far along the autism spectrum, yet in any reasonable sense she has a deeper intuitive, empathic, as well as propositional understanding of minds, human and otherwise, than almost certainly anyone reading this. And I wonder if people with sensory processing issues like me (for all my gain in smell I have bizarre defects in visual processing, but that’s another story) and Grandin’s dyslexic student might be ultimately seen as coming from the same etiology. Again, at the end of the day this is probably another instance of your universally quantified claim about the DSM.
      (3) We need to be very careful in differentiating what is actually being shown on tests from our interpretations of them. In this respect, many of the offhand comments by philosophers of mind about autistics at least in the debate concerning simulationism from the last time I taught a class on that (maybe a decade ago) struck me as being about as well researched and thought out as now thoroughly debunked older talk about “C Fibers” and “reduction” and (less excusably now) even contemporary talk about “physical facts.”
      As far as ToM, even though I mostly blog about metaphysics and aesthetics, I’ve taught and published in cognitive science (my cv is available on-line), and I think if there’s any disagreement between our views it does concern the manner in which you distinguish “what mental states people have” in opposition to emotional responses. I gather that I’m much more Dennettian than you about “mental states” and much more Demasioian about emotions. Of course, reasonable people of good will disagree about these things.
      Please have the last word on this. I have immense respect for your work and, notwithstanding my overzealous Dennettian instrumentalism, at the end of the day would defer to you about just about any issue in the philosophy of mind. I think your work on the intersection of consciousness and ethics as well as self-control is a necessary part of correcting the stuff I was griping about in my previous post with respect to debates concerning action theory, and hope to be able to study it some day.

      Like

      Reply
    13. Jon Cogburn Avatar
      Jon Cogburn

      Oh man fantastic review, and interesting point about what we can learn from phenomenological tradition in response to his understanding of reason as rule governed manipulation.

      Like

      Reply
    14. Alan White Avatar
      Alan White

      Neil–
      Than you for the link and a great review. Reading your reviews always brings to mind a line from As Good as It Gets said by Nicholson to Hunt’s character, but slightly revised:
      “You make me want to be a better reviewer.”

      Like

      Reply
    15. Becko Copenhaver Avatar
      Becko Copenhaver

      Jon, how would ASD differ in your view from Sensory Processing Disorder? What you describe sounds more like SPD to my untrained ear, and is similar to what you describe because no one has (I think) suggested that SPD involves a mind-reading deficit. Now, some people on the autism spectrum also have SPD. But there are folks who are not on the spectrum but who do have SPD (like me).

      Like

      Reply
    16. Becko Copenhaver Avatar
      Becko Copenhaver

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_processing_disorder

      Like

      Reply
    17. Pen Avatar
      Pen

      What’s interesting about the test is that 80% of the people who scored 32 or above then went on to pass other diagnostic tests for what’s now called Autism Spectrum Disorder.

      But what it says on the Wired page is:

      Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher.

      It is also what the original paper claims:

      80% of the adults with AS/HFA scored 32+

      These are two completely different claims. The first one is saying that given that someone scored 32 or above, there’s an 80% chance that he or she will be diagnosed with autism. The second is that given one is diagnosed with autism, there is an 80% chance that he or she will score 32 or higher on the test.

      In short, Claim 1: P(autism | 32+) = 80% vs Claim 2: P(32+| autism) = 80%.

      Another way of interpreting the numbers is, Claim 1: P(false positive) = 20% vs Claim 2: P(false negative) = 20%

      It’s interesting that the original paper at one point makes the second claim, when no data is in support of it.

      As shown in the subsample of students in Group 3 above, 80% of those scoring 32+ met DSM-IV criteria.

      But in fact, it’s 7/11 = 63. 6%.

      To validate the AQ in Group 3, we called in for clinical interview all subjects scoring 32+, of whom 11 agreed to be interviewed… Of the 11 subjects scoring 32+, 7 of these met criteria for HFA or AS.

      Like

      Reply
    18. Neil Levy Avatar
      Neil Levy

      That’s an incredibly generous comment. I doubt I am better informed than you about ASD. I suspect that there is another source of our disagreement (to the extent we have one: its not big) apart from our respective views about mental states. I am an introspection skeptic and probably put less weight on first-person reports than you do. As always, settling one dispute requires settling lots.

      Like

      Reply
    19. Neil Levy Avatar
      Neil Levy

      Thanks Alan. Sometimes a book calls for attention. Sometimes it is because you are really excited about it. And then there’s this one.

      Like

      Reply

    Leave a reply to Neil Levy Cancel reply