Simon Baron-Cohen
| Simon Baron-Cohen | |
|---|---|
Baron-Cohen in 2011
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| Born | 15 August 1958 |
| Residence | England |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | Psychology and Cognitive neuroscience |
| Institutions | University of Cambridge |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | Social cognition and pretend-play in autism (1985) |
| Doctoral advisor | Uta Frith |
| Known for | Autism research |
| Notable awards | Kanner-Asperger Medal 2013 (WGAS) |
Simon Baron-Cohen FBA (born 15 August 1958) is Professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He is the Director of the University's Autism Research Centre, and a Fellow of Trinity College. In 1985 he formulated the mindblindness theory of autism, the evidence for which was collated in his 1995 book. In 1997, he formulated the fetal sex steroid theory of autism, the key test of which was published in 2015. He has also made major contributions to the fields of typical cognitive sex differences, autism prevalence and screening, autism genetics, autism neuroimaging, autism and technical ability, and synaesthesia.
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. He completed a PhD in Psychology at University College London; his doctoral research was in collaboration with his supervisor Uta Frith.
He married Bridget Lindley, a family rights lawyer, in 1987. She died in 2016.
Baron-Cohen has three children, the eldest of whom is screenwriter and director Sam Baron. He has an older brother Dan Baron Cohen and three younger siblings, brother Ash Baron-Cohen and sisters Suzie and Liz. Their cousin is the actor and comedian Sacha Baron Cohen. Baron-Cohen's surname includes a hyphen—which is not the case with other members of his family—because of a typographical error in his first professional article; he never had the error corrected.
While he was a member of the Cognitive Development Unit (CDU) in London, in 1985 Baron-Cohen was lead author of the first study, published with Alan M. Leslie and Uta Frith, which proposed a correlation between children with autism and delays in the development of a theory of mind, known as ToM. A theory of mind is the ability to imagine other people's emotions and thoughts, and it is a skill that according to Baron-Cohen's research is typically delayed developmentally in children with autism.
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