written: 2019-06-09
last run: 2019-06-13

Description of task

The EA task has a control condition, in the form of the ‘Circle Task’, which instructs participants to track real-time changes in the shade of a circle (“How light or dark is the color in the circle?”). The Circle Task is effectively a non-emotional analogue to the EA task, which, if performed correctly, allows us to be sure the participant understands the concept underlying the EA task (and therefore if their performance is impaired, this is due to a social cognition/emotional impairment, not because of task confusion).

There are 6 ‘Circle Task’ conditions interspersed between the EA task stimuli, and all contain exactly 10 changes in hue (the length of each video varies slightly).


Ground truth ratings

HC ratings (n=152)

Summary: We see that the HC participants, as a group, are largely accurate in their ratings.

SSD ratings (n=230)

Summary: Likewise, we see that the SSD participants, as a group, are largely accurate in their ratings.

Outlier distribution

In addition to looking at average group performance, we want to identify if any particular individual had especially low performance on the ‘Circle Task’.

Here, we determined outliers by a visual review of the distribution of data. We elected to remove participants with an absolute difference/delta value of 120, across all 6 videos. The participants to be removed are: SPN01_ZHH_0053, SPN01_ZHP_0098, SPN01_ZHP_0085, SPN01_ZHP_0103.

Outlier data

As an example of outlier performance that we have removed from all subsequent analyses, the think red line below shows the responses of SPN01_ZHP_0098.