Simon Baron-Cohen

Simon Baron-Cohen (born London, 1958) is a British clinical psychologist and professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, where he directs the Autism Research Centre. His work lies in developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and he is a leading figure in the scientific study of autism.

He studied at Oxford, at the Institute of Psychiatry in London and at University College London, where he completed his doctorate under Uta Frith. In the mid-1980s, together with Frith and Alan Leslie, he formulated the theory of mind hypothesis to explain the social difficulties in autism: the largely innate ability to attribute mental states to others. Using the false belief test, his experiments suggested that autistic children were delayed in this skill. He brought these conclusions together in Mindblindness (1995) and later designed the Eyes Test to measure sensitivity to the mental meaning of other people's eyes.

In 2003 he proposed the empathising-systemising theory, which distinguishes between the tendency to understand and respond to others' minds and the tendency to analyse rule-based systems. On this view, autism is an extreme of the typically male cognitive profile, an idea he set out in The Essential Difference (2003). Linked to it is the prenatal sex steroid hypothesis, which he tested in a longitudinal study in Cambridge and later with samples from the Danish Biobank.

His work also includes research on synaesthesia and educational tools that teach autistic children to recognise emotions. His influence has been considerable in autism research and in debates about sex differences, although his hormonal explanations and his view of autistic talent remain contested.