Sir Simon Philip Baron-Cohen was born on 15 August 1958 and is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge.
37 Facts About Simon Baron-Cohen
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Simon Baron-Cohen is the director of the university's Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College.
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In 1985, Baron-Cohen formulated the mindblindness theory of autism, the evidence for which he collated and published in 1995.
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Simon Baron-Cohen was knighted in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to autistic people.
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Simon Baron-Cohen was born into a middle-class Jewish family in London.
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Simon Baron-Cohen has an elder brother Dan Baron Cohen and three younger siblings, brother Ash Baron-Cohen and sisters Suzie and Liz.
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Simon Baron-Cohen's cousins include actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and composer Erran Baron Cohen.
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Simon Baron-Cohen completed a BA in human sciences at New College, Oxford, and an MPhil in clinical psychology at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London.
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Simon Baron-Cohen received a PhD in psychology at University College London; his doctoral research was in collaboration with his supervisor Uta Frith.
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In 1997, Simon Baron-Cohen developed the "empathizing-systemizing theory" which states that humans may be classified on the basis of their scores along two dimensions.
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Simon Baron-Cohen proposed this theory to understand why autism is more common in males.
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Simon Baron-Cohen's team discovered that in typical children, amount of eye contact, rate of vocabulary development, quality of social relationships, theory of mind performance, and scores on the empathy quotient are all inversely correlated with prenatal testosterone levels.
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Simon Baron-Cohen's group studied the rate of autism in offspring of mothers with polycystic ovary syndrome, a medical condition caused by elevated prenatal testosterone.
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Simon Baron-Cohen found that in women with PCOS, the odds of having a child with autism are significantly increased.
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Simon Baron-Cohen went on to show that children with autism are blind to the mentalistic significance of the eyes and show deficits in advanced ToM, measured by the "reading the mind in the eyes test" that he designed.
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Simon Baron-Cohen conducted the first neuroimaging study of ToM in typical and autistic adults, and studied patients demonstrating lesions in the orbito- and medial-prefrontal cortex and amygdala can impair ToM.
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Simon Baron-Cohen reported the first evidence of atypical amygdala function in autism during ToM.
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Simon Baron-Cohen found Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms partly contribute to individual differences on this dimensional trait measure on which autistic people are impaired.
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Simon Baron-Cohen developed the Mindreading software for special education, which was nominated for an award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts interactive award in 2002.
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Simon Baron-Cohen's lab developed The Transporters, an animation series designed to teach children with autism to recognize and understand emotions.
21.
Time magazine has criticized the assortative mating theory proposed by Simon Baron-Cohen, claiming that it is largely speculative and based on anecdotal evidence.
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The developers of the software Simon Baron-Cohen used for a 2009 study which reported that autistic individuals possessed superior visual acuity said that his results were impossible based on the technology used in the study.
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Simon Baron-Cohen's team responded to this criticism by re-running the study and retracting the claim.
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Simon Baron-Cohen's work is easily understood as classifying Autistic people as not fully human.
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Simon Baron-Cohen is professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
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Simon Baron-Cohen is the director of the university's Autism Research Centre and a Fellow of Trinity College.
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Simon Baron-Cohen is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society, the British Academy, the Academy of Medical Sciences, and the Association for Psychological Science.
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Simon Baron-Cohen is a BPS Chartered Psychologist and a Senior Investigator at the National Institute for Health and Care Research.
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Simon Baron-Cohen serves as vice-president of the National Autistic Society, and was the 2012 chairman of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence Guideline Development Group for adults with autism.
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Simon Baron-Cohen has served as vice-president and president of the International Society for Autism Research.
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Simon Baron-Cohen is co-editor in chief of the journal Molecular Autism.
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Simon Baron-Cohen was the chair of the Psychology Section of the British Academy.
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Simon Baron-Cohen was awarded the 1990 Spearman Medal from the BPS, the McAndless Award from the American Psychological Association, the 1993 May Davidson Award for Clinical Psychology from the BPS, and the 2006 presidents' Award from the BPS.
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Simon Baron-Cohen received an honorary degree from Abertay University in 2012, and was awarded the Kanner-Asperger Medal in 2013 by the Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft Autismus-Spektrum as a Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to autism research.
35.
Simon Baron-Cohen was knighted in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to people with autism.
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In 1987, Simon Baron-Cohen married Bridget Lindley, a family rights lawyer whom he had met in Oxford.
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Simon Baron-Cohen is a cousin of actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen.