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Simon Baron-Cohen is a professor of developmental psychopathology in the departments of psychiatry and experimental psychology at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom. He obtained a PhD in psychology at University College London. He is best known for his work on autism, including his theory that autism is an extreme form of the "male brain", and for his work on theory of mind, empathy, and systemizing.

Research areas

Baron-Cohen's first research paper on autism was published in 1985, with Uta Frith and Alan Leslie. It proposed that autistic children's social and communication difficulties are a result of a delay in the development of a theory of mind. Tested using the false belief experiment, this result has been replicated innumerable times.

In his 1995 book Mindblindness, he suggested that an individual's theory of mind depends on a set of brain mechanisms that develop in early childhood, including the eye direction detector (EDD), the shared attention mechanism (SAM), and the intentionality detector (ID). Baron-Cohen singled out SAM as a key precursor to theory of mind, giving rise to the first early screening test for autism, the CHAT (Checklist for Autism in Toddlers). This quick test is used at 18 months old to check if the child is showing behaviours such as pointing and gaze following as examples of shared (or joint) attention. Absence or delays in joint attention is one marker of risk for a later diagnosis of autism.

In 1999, he and his colleagues published the first evidence that theory of mind relied on the amygdala, a key region in the brain involved in decoding and responding to others' actions and mental states. More recently he has put forward evidence that the unequal sex ratio in autism may be a reflection of elevated foetal testosterone (FT) levels, though this theory remains to be fully tested as at present all the available evidence comes from studies of typically developing children and individual differences in social skills, which are correlated with FT. (See also Sexual differentiation.)

His hormonal explanation is not at odds with a genetic theory of autism, and Baron-Cohen has not only argued that people on the autistic spectrum are strong "systemizers" (showing a strong attraction to systems, and a drive to identify lawful or regular patterns within a system, as a way of understanding and predicting systems), but that their parents are too. (See also EQ SQ Theory.)

His most recent idea is that autism may be the result of assortative mating of two strong systemizing parents. Evidence for this includes the finding that both mothers and fathers of children on the autistic spectrum have excellent attention to, memory for, and sensitivity to detail.

As a psychologist, Baron-Cohen's work has had far reaching influences in the fields of developmental psychology, primate behavioural literature and philosophy, as well as cognitive neuroscience.

In addition to basic research into the biomedical causes of autism, Baron-Cohen and his colleagues have produced practical tools for people with autism, including Mind Reading: An Interactive Guide to Human Emotions, which is educational software for helping to improve emotion-recognition skills. More recently, he and his team created The Transporters, a children's animation series which superimposed real human faces showing emotions onto animated vehicles, as a way of harnessing the strong interest in systems (vehicles being an example of a system) that even preschoolers with autism show, to help make faces and emotional expressions more autism-friendly and predictable.

Books

Dr Baron-Cohen has written five books, including Mindblindness (1995), and has edited three.

In Baron-Cohen's book, The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain (2004), he argues that there are innate differences between male and female brains. Female brains are predominantly wired for empathy, he reasons, whereas male brains are predominantly wired for "understanding and building systems". He describes autism as an extreme version of the male brain, which he postulates as an explanation for why autism is more common among males.

In addition to autism, Baron-Cohen is also one of the pioneers in the empirical study of synaesthesia, and has edited a book on it: Synaesthesia: Classic and contemporary readings (1997).

Trivia

• Dr Baron-Cohen is the cousin of Sacha Baron Cohen, the actor and comedian who is known for his characters "Ali G," "Borat," and "Bruno".

See also

• Autism
• Autism epidemic
• Controversies in autism
• Theory of mind
• Autism Spectrum Quotient
• EQ SQ Theory
• Asperger Syndrome
• Neural mechanisms behind shifts of attention

References

1. (Baron-Cohen, S., Leslie, A., & Frith, U. (1985). Does the autistic child have a 'theory of mind'? Cognition, 21, 37-46.
2. http://depts.washington.edu/dataproj/chat.html
3. http://www.jkp.com/mindreading
4. http://www.transporters.tv
5. Empathizing with Simon Baron-Cohen's cousin, August 04, 2004.

External links

• Autism Research Centre, University of Cambridge; Professor Baron-Cohen, Director
• They just can't help it, Simon Baron-Cohen, The Guardian (April 17 2003)
• The Male Condition, Simon Baron-Cohen, The New York Times Op-Ed Section, (August 8, 2005)
• The Assortative Mating Theory: A Talk with Simon Baron-Cohen, Edge_Foundation discussion, 2005
• Transporters.tv for a copy of The Transporters DVD for free (to UK residents)
• Mind Reading: The interactive guide to emotions, for a DVD for teaching emotion recognition
• EQSQ.com: How Does Your Mind Work - Brain-function psychological tests developed by Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Sally Wheelwright, and their team.
• Autism-Spectrum Quotient Test, Wired magazine, Issue 9.12, December 2001.
• CHAT (Checklist for Autism in Toddlers)

• British psychologists
• Developmental psychologists
• Autism
• Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge
• Living people