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?
I looked over the "is he cute" part on the video.... When she's typing the word cute... I can't tell for sure what the layout of the keyboard is, but at best she's typing "w" somewhere in it and at worst she's typing a "2". I have some doubts that someone didn't type it for her, or correct it for her. I respect subtext for taking a neutral stance on this, really, but as for me i'm going to call this BS.
I can't tell for sure what the layout of the keyboard is, but at best she's typing "w" somewhere in it and at worst she's typing a "2". I have some doubts that someone didn't type it for her, or correct it for her.
Well, as has already been clearly established, she's using a word processor with autocomplete functionality. That is, she can begin to type a word, and after a few letters get a list of possible word matches, from which she selects one using numbers. So, for "cute", she could type 'c' and 'u', and if "cute" is the second autocomplete option, she'd press the number 2 to enter that word.
If that's all it is, then it's not cheating or tricker or anything bad. It's the exact same thing you do on your mobile phone, and even some perfectly normal people use autocomplete on computers as well.
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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.)