A Level Psychology OCR Test 2026 – 400 Free Practice Questions to Pass the Exam

The correct response highlights the importance of ensuring validity in experiments aimed at measuring specific cognitive abilities, such as emotional recognition. In Baron-Cohen's study, using the gender recognition of eyes task and basic emotional recognition of faces served as a control was crucial for establishing whether the participants were accurately performing the tasks related to emotional recognition, without their performance being influenced by unrelated cognitive processes.

By comparing results from this control task to the primary experimental tasks, researchers could effectively isolate the variables they were interested in, such as theory of mind deficiencies often associated with autism. This choice also ensures that any significant differences observed in emotional recognition tasks are truly indicative of the abilities being measured, rather than being confounded by other factors like general intelligence or memory unrelated to emotional processing.