Autism Assessment: A Science & Technology Studies Perspective

Doug Maynard (Department of Sociology)'s presentation concerns clinical, psychological testing for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and draws STS implications for experimental studies involving Theory of Mind (ToM), which is the ability to impute mental states to others or to “mentalize” (Baron-Cohen 1993; Frith 2001). The talk inspects the interactional structures of psychological testing, and then extrapolates our findings to two of the more well-known ToM experiments.