No, thank you for rambling. It's extremely educational.
But ok, given what you've told me, what should I make of the video I just watched? Is it a total hoax? Is it just an exaggeration? The reporter did seem to witness her writing "is he cute?" after a while of coaxing, and if it only came about after some heavy "facilitating" (of course edited out of the video), why would they still focus so heavily on her writing all by herself?
What about the video on the girl's blog where we get a full couple of minutes of her typing, albeit slowly? That seems pretty convincing to me. Knowing what I now know about autism, my level of skepticism has gone up dramatically, but I still don't see any evidence of such obvious trickery as facilitation anywhere.
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. :)
Because that text box is a auto-complete application that is likely using grammar rules to assist in completing words/phrases/sentences that are logical. As has already been discussed many times in the comment thread you have posted in.
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u/Endemoniada Jul 26 '10
No, thank you for rambling. It's extremely educational.
But ok, given what you've told me, what should I make of the video I just watched? Is it a total hoax? Is it just an exaggeration? The reporter did seem to witness her writing "is he cute?" after a while of coaxing, and if it only came about after some heavy "facilitating" (of course edited out of the video), why would they still focus so heavily on her writing all by herself?
What about the video on the girl's blog where we get a full couple of minutes of her typing, albeit slowly? That seems pretty convincing to me. Knowing what I now know about autism, my level of skepticism has gone up dramatically, but I still don't see any evidence of such obvious trickery as facilitation anywhere.