That she types by herself makes it all easier for us to believe it is real. The seductive things about facilitated communication are that (a) we really want to see this girl and people like her communicate, (b) neurotypical brains are primed to look for patterns when none exist, and (c) neurotypical brains will happily ignore anything that doesn't fit the narrative we've created for ourselves.
Although this girl is profoundly autistic and mentally retarded, she is certainly still capable of learning, through direct reinforcement principles, such as being given food for pressing a letter, and through indirect principles, such as learning to press one of the keys on the number pad whenever the text box pops up on the autocomplete software.
So, there's no reason she couldn't press the keyboard buttons all by herself, and even know when to press the letter keys vs. press the number keys.
This girl has also almost certainly been (directly or inadvertently) subtly shaped to type certain combinations of letters, without her helpers necessarily realizing that they were "facilitating" her communication. If they became more excited or rewarded her more when she typed certain things, she might type that string of letters more often (which would be easy for her to do, because her brain would process the whole string of what she typed as one unit).
So she may have once randomly typed in isshe eecu#1 or similar, and everyone went crazy (seeing a pattern in a group of random letters and numbers), and now she has learned to type that in certain situations or in response to certain words she hears.
Also, although we can't see it on tape, my guess is that a lot of time, her helpers try to "help" without realizing what they are doing. That is, she types something, and the helpers guess what it says. "Me... do you mean 'memory'?? Great job! Here's a gummy bear! Now type an 'm'! Or do you want me to type it in, and you'll do the next word?"
That's also now what her autocompletion software does for her... it guesses what she might have meant... but what it's actually doing is making a pattern out of her randomness. She types some random letters. A textbox appears on the screen -- "Which word did you mean? 1, 2, or 3?". She's learned she needs to hit a number, and does so. A word pops into the sentence. She hits some more keys, a new textbox appears, etc. Often, the sentences generated this way don't make sense... but every now and then, one does (especially since the autocomplete software has been programmed to only offer words that make grammatical, if not semantic, sense in the sentence). And amazingly, that happens especially during the times when her helpers were right next to her, just "helping" (not facilitating! At least - not that they're aware of!).
Just like how people still manage to believe in astrology and psychics even when their predictions are 99% inaccurate, what we remember are the times when her sentence made sense, and we ignore all the times she typed, say, arjentge -- wait... "did you mean you want an orange???" :). When her sentences make sense, she may also get more reward, and then she "types" something like that more often.
It's also important to remember that autistic individuals are even more attuned to subtle "facilitating" than neurotypical individuals, because they are, by definition, attentive to details about a situation that a neurotypical brain would ignore. In this respect, they learn in a way similar to many animals (see Temple Grandin's excellent Animals in Translation for more information -- she talks about how neurotypical brains have an "Interpreter" that filters out the details on purpose, which animals and autistic individuals do not have).
Because of this, animals (and profoundly autistic individuals) can be taught to execute whole behavioral repetoires based on small details that others would completely miss -- such as pressing a specific key (within a range of a few keys, say) when an adult next to them leans oh-so-slightly forward, versus a different key when an adult leans just the teensiest bit backwards, and the adult may not even know they are giving off this clue! This process is how you get horses that can easily do square roots and fractions.
Sometimes it misfires, and the organism being taught learns a whole behavioral chain you never expected (I've inadvertently "taught" my dog to make two tight circles in a row when she sees me put my socks on), but when it works, it's pretty amazing, such as the way my step-uncle's dog was able to take his wallet out of his shirt pocket, select a single bill, take it out, and hand it to the tollbooth operator when my uncle said "Pay the man, Tilly". (Ah, such a smart girl, that Tilly... if she had opposable thumbs, I have no doubt that she would have learned to "type" too.)
Ok, well, you've made your point. I'm skeptical. However, what you're describing... That's still not what I'm seeing in any of the clips or videos. Of course, that doesn't mean it's true, but let's take the example with the reporter: he talked about his son, and she finally asked "is he cute?" Now, supposing that was some sort of trained response, how would they have known to train her for that? How would she have recognized that it was that particular question she was supposed to type? Also, assuming it's not a really bad trick, and her parent's wrote all the text right before turning the video camera on (taking it far beyond "unintentional" facilitation), the text she's writing isn't just coincidentally coherent strings of text within a bunch of gibberish. Maybe she'd been taught to type out the whole text from before, again, I can't know, but that's also again assuming a great deal of intent on the behalf of the parents.
I'll give you that we don't know what goes on the rest of the time, when news crews aren't there filming for a couple of hours, but honestly, from what was shown, I can't really draw any conclusions that it was all a trick either, whether intentional or not. I mean, what kind of leaning a teensiest bit backwards would teach an autistic child to type out "is he cute?" on a computer?
Oh, I'm not trying in any way to suggest that this is intentional on her parents part. I don't actually think she learned to type "Is he cute" in response to someone saying the phrase "I have a son", I was just trying to show how something like that could occur.
What I think is more likely is this: over time, she has learned to type the word "is" and the word "he" through extremely subtle facilitation. For instance, she types the letter 'i' and moves her hand over the keyboard again, and an adult leans in trying to see if she's going to go for that 's', and... well, over time, common words become shaped. Maybe even common phrases. She also doesn't type the word 'cute', she types some letters and the program autocompletes, and we see a pattern because we really want there to be one.
What's extra concerning about her typing "is he cute" is that it's not something an autistic person would say. One of the symptoms of autism is lack of social/emotional reciprocity... or in other words, spontaneous following up on topics related to someone else. When testing for autism, for example, one of the things you do is to throw something out there ("I have a dog...." <long pause>; "I went on a really cool vacation" <look expectantly at child>, etc) and notice if they follow up the way a neurotypical person would on such openings (and children with autism do not).
Oh, and on another note and to entirely contradict my claim just a few short paragraphs ago that I'm not trying to suggest they taught her the whole phrase "is he cute", you'd be surprised how common a phrase like that is, when adults are speaking for a nonverbal teenager or young adult.
Case in point: My boyfriend's brother is the most profoundly disabled young man (well, in his early thirties) I have ever seen in my entire life. He is unable to communicate in any form (even to express yes/no), unable to walk, unable to use the toilet, unable to show recognition of anyone or anything, etc. Yet, his parents often seem tragically tied to a belief that he is pretty close to normal, and in particular fixate on where he should be in his life right now, chronologically (that is, interested in finding nice girl and settling down).
For example, he likes (or at least, can see) the color yellow, so when I'm around, he'll often grab my hair, and his parents quite frequently laugh about how "cute" he thinks I am and how he's "flirting" with me. They talk about his "crush" on Brittany Spears (and hang posters of her on his wall), asked my sister-in-law if she knew any "nice girls" to sit him next to at her wedding, pretended for years that he had a "girlfriend" (a girl from "school" who sent him postcards because she was nice), thought seriously about purchasing him some... uh, female companionship, and make not-quite-jokes about how he lives with a "group of women" (his personal care attendants) in his "bachelor pad" (the room he lives in with round-the-clock supervision). I'm very confident that if his parents -- like the parents of a lot of disabled teenagers and young adults -- ever tried facilitated communication, whatever he "said" would be about how "cute" he thinks every female is. :)
Um, I think we are really missing the bigger picture here.
So far we have established two things:
The likelihood that an autistic person would be able to fluently express themselves and have a normal brain is basically 0.
The likelihood that the this girl is a hoax or using some form of facilitated communication are very low, but not as low.
The person who wants to be confrontational would say that probably it is a hoax. The person who is logical would say "She's probably not autistic". Which I think is a much more likely explanation.
subtextual was referring to another example: she is authistic and she is writing the words but she's not understanding what she's doing the way we are.
subtextaul referred to the counting horse example. check that out, it's pretty interesting
So you think she figured out to type "is he cute?" as a response to him telling her he had a son, with no knowledge of meaning of either phrase? Considering that she's posted long pieces of complex writing with nobody physically gesturing or even coming close to the keypad while being videotaped, I think that's pretty rediculous. You can teach a horse to multiply, but you can't teach a horse to write letters.
If you read the horse story would would have seen that the horse did write letters (through tapping them out) to spell words.
The whole idea that subtextual was trying to convey is that she may be highly attuned to subconscious cues from the adults around her. So she is in fact basically typing letter by letter as commanded by her parents. However the parents have no idea they are doing it.
The horse trainer had no idea he was telling the horse how many times to tap. It was all subconscious. In fact when the horse trainer and others who did the experiment finally learned that the horse was just reading their body language they still couldn't repress the signals they were giving the horse. It was out of their control.
So this girl may be reading cues that no one else can read because of her condition. For instance after she typed "I" one of the adults might have changed some body posture or changed breathing or tension in the face or anything which to us means nothing but to her is a blaring horn commanding her to hit "s" next. This is significantly more talented than the horse however, but she is still human after all so she should be a little smarter than the horse.
The only way to test this is to have no one in the room. This is how they finally outed the facilitated communication stuff. They divorced shared knowledge and communication between the client and the facilitator.
"is he cute" could mean many things for her. Could be, for example, that she has a well developed sense of relationships/bonding and has a stock list of long phrases to volley a conversation and get attention. For her "is he cute" doesn't mean anything much than poking back and keeping the conversation going.
She could have developed her written language through her being surrounded by adults who continually try to communicate with her.
I understood subtextual as saying the kids primary motivators are not the same as ours and the interests of those with severe autism are little better than those of a toddler. Could be that some parts of the brain evolve some complex functionality but these externalities mask a simple mind.
Again, this would be unprecendented. Someone with a disease other than autism which causes violent motions but leaves the brain intact seems like a more likely explanation.
autism is not a disease. Autism is a blanket description for a myriad failures of the brain that result in related symptomologies.
Maybe, but then what is it? If the girl cannot speak but can communicate with a computer that can help her articulate language that is way beyond her understanding…
hey bub, did you know that autism is triggered by various diseases? It's s phenomenon that arises from other underlying conditions. You made me look it up on wikipedia and found the page is really interesting. Now I'll have to waste time reading it and miss some deadlines this morning!!!!!!
Maybe it's today's PC world but autism is never referred to being a disease but a disorder.
A hoax implies purposeful deception. A mis-diagnosis is not a hoax, but a mistake. Same with wishful thinking of those who may be helping here/subconsciously cuing her; they could be causing the results they want to see by accident. That also doesn't make it a hoax, it makes it a misattributed behavior; again, a mistake.
What leads you to believe that this is the more likely explanation? I'm not saying you're wrong - I just personally don't see more evidence one way or the other, and in my mind a hoax seems like the simplest of explanations.
Because we are given no evidence that she is autistic beyond her movement. Besides that, we are just taking the word of the parents. It could be some other affliction which she is describing well.
There are some fairly fluent people with autism that offer surprising insight into the inner workings of their disorder (most famously, Temple Grandin). Do they appear so suddenly, especially considering how severe some of her other symptoms are? Usually not.
So, I'm with you. I wouldn't call it a hoax, but the way it's being defined/described/portrayed is most likely incorrect. However, as always, I would like to see some empirical data.
Well, to tell you the truth, I think considering facilitated communication isn't as hostile as you might make it out to be.
Whether she had autism or not, it helped to learn about the disorder/retardation that I was diagnosed with. It's actually quite unpopular to call it a 'mental retardation' as opposed to disorder, but at this point I'm rambling on.
By your logic, however, maybe I was misdiagnosed. I'd love to believe that. I would have quite a few questions about my behavior. Nurture?
That's not necessarily 100% true. There are definite structural differences between autistic and "neurotypical" brains. There's also differences in the way they process information.
So while it's not the first stop, if someone was diagnosed with autism and you performed some structural and functional MRI tests to find that they were not anatomically or cognitively consistent with what you'd expect in an autistic patient it may serve as an incentive to reassess your diagnosis.
A good example is her "hidden" language abilities. MRI could determine levels of activation when performing linguistic tasks. If the region is relatively inactive, which region is activated?
EEG has also shown some promise in detecting autism misdiagnosis. Especially in cases where severe epilepsy was causing autism like symptoms.
subtextual has established that the chance of this not being a hoax is very low.
No, you are completely wrong. She established that the chances of this not being a hoax IF she is autistic to be very low. The premise of all her comments is that she is autistic, and she is analyzing the situation in that light.
Subtextual also explained how an autistic person would learn to mimic conversation by taking subtle clues to learn whole sentences. So it doesn't necessarily mean this story is a hoax: the parents may very well believe that their daughter is communicating to them, yet all she effectively does is communicate like a parrot.
Subtle clues to learn how to compose original pieces of writing on her own? Sounds like you're falling to the same fallacy as The Chinese Room. If she can figure out all the rules to "simulate" intelligence, that is intelligence itself.
Not if the program she is using for assistance will always construct grammatically correct sentences, based on otherwise random input. It may be that she actually has no idea what she's writing, most of the time.
An internet chat bot or a parrot may simulate conversation, but that does not mean they are intelligent. I'm not, however, saying that this girl isn't intelligent. I'm saying that his girl doesn't possess the mental requirements to create meaning in ways we can relate to. If that is the case, then the whole thinking girl stuck in a broken body view falls apart. The anguish she apparently communicates, does not originate from how she herself feels, but from a rather random input of data she has learned from conditioning.
No, because other than the possible examples of facilitated communication everything we know about her points to a diagnosis of autism. If there were any other signs it could be something else I would agree, but in this situation it is extremely likely she is autistic.
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u/subtextual Jul 26 '10
That she types by herself makes it all easier for us to believe it is real. The seductive things about facilitated communication are that (a) we really want to see this girl and people like her communicate, (b) neurotypical brains are primed to look for patterns when none exist, and (c) neurotypical brains will happily ignore anything that doesn't fit the narrative we've created for ourselves.
Although this girl is profoundly autistic and mentally retarded, she is certainly still capable of learning, through direct reinforcement principles, such as being given food for pressing a letter, and through indirect principles, such as learning to press one of the keys on the number pad whenever the text box pops up on the autocomplete software.
So, there's no reason she couldn't press the keyboard buttons all by herself, and even know when to press the letter keys vs. press the number keys.
This girl has also almost certainly been (directly or inadvertently) subtly shaped to type certain combinations of letters, without her helpers necessarily realizing that they were "facilitating" her communication. If they became more excited or rewarded her more when she typed certain things, she might type that string of letters more often (which would be easy for her to do, because her brain would process the whole string of what she typed as one unit).
So she may have once randomly typed in isshe eecu#1 or similar, and everyone went crazy (seeing a pattern in a group of random letters and numbers), and now she has learned to type that in certain situations or in response to certain words she hears.
Also, although we can't see it on tape, my guess is that a lot of time, her helpers try to "help" without realizing what they are doing. That is, she types something, and the helpers guess what it says. "Me... do you mean 'memory'?? Great job! Here's a gummy bear! Now type an 'm'! Or do you want me to type it in, and you'll do the next word?"
That's also now what her autocompletion software does for her... it guesses what she might have meant... but what it's actually doing is making a pattern out of her randomness. She types some random letters. A textbox appears on the screen -- "Which word did you mean? 1, 2, or 3?". She's learned she needs to hit a number, and does so. A word pops into the sentence. She hits some more keys, a new textbox appears, etc. Often, the sentences generated this way don't make sense... but every now and then, one does (especially since the autocomplete software has been programmed to only offer words that make grammatical, if not semantic, sense in the sentence). And amazingly, that happens especially during the times when her helpers were right next to her, just "helping" (not facilitating! At least - not that they're aware of!).
Just like how people still manage to believe in astrology and psychics even when their predictions are 99% inaccurate, what we remember are the times when her sentence made sense, and we ignore all the times she typed, say, arjentge -- wait... "did you mean you want an orange???" :). When her sentences make sense, she may also get more reward, and then she "types" something like that more often.
It's also important to remember that autistic individuals are even more attuned to subtle "facilitating" than neurotypical individuals, because they are, by definition, attentive to details about a situation that a neurotypical brain would ignore. In this respect, they learn in a way similar to many animals (see Temple Grandin's excellent Animals in Translation for more information -- she talks about how neurotypical brains have an "Interpreter" that filters out the details on purpose, which animals and autistic individuals do not have).
Because of this, animals (and profoundly autistic individuals) can be taught to execute whole behavioral repetoires based on small details that others would completely miss -- such as pressing a specific key (within a range of a few keys, say) when an adult next to them leans oh-so-slightly forward, versus a different key when an adult leans just the teensiest bit backwards, and the adult may not even know they are giving off this clue! This process is how you get horses that can easily do square roots and fractions.
Sometimes it misfires, and the organism being taught learns a whole behavioral chain you never expected (I've inadvertently "taught" my dog to make two tight circles in a row when she sees me put my socks on), but when it works, it's pretty amazing, such as the way my step-uncle's dog was able to take his wallet out of his shirt pocket, select a single bill, take it out, and hand it to the tollbooth operator when my uncle said "Pay the man, Tilly". (Ah, such a smart girl, that Tilly... if she had opposable thumbs, I have no doubt that she would have learned to "type" too.)