Peer review at Scientific Reports, Part II

As we saw in Part I, one of the problems that Reviewer 1 had with my critique of a paper on Facilitated Communication was my skepticism about the existence of language disorders “that combine extant oral skills with pragmatics skills that only emerge during hunt-and-peck typing.” The reviewer said that I was implying that are no known disorders in which people can type things they can’t speak. (So much for my deaf friends and relatives, with whom–way back when–I used to correspond via TTY).

Reviewer 1 had just one other issue with my critique:

Much of the response appears fixated on message-passing experiments, which is a useful design, but cannot be seen as the only viable means of deriving useful information related to the question of autistic communicative agency. Jawal et al. (2020) point to a variety of reasons the results of prior message passing studies may not fully reflect the agency of all autistic individuals using spelling-based forms of communication. There are certainly points at which I feel Jaswal et al. could have done a better job of connecting the dots, but that alone hardly seems worth pointing out in an alternative publication.

Aside from the fact that message passing (e.g., asking the child a question that the facilitator doesn’t know the answer to) is the simplest, most direct way to test authorship (something that anyone who wants to can easily do at any time without any expensive machinery), “connecting the dots”, as I wrote, is only one of several problems with Jaswal’s article:

To explain why they have eschewed message passing tests in favor of expensive eye-tracking equipment and painstaking coding of eye-gaze data, Jaswal et al claim that message-passing tests are problematic. They state that (1) “tests that fail to take into account a group’s unique developmental history can underestimate or misrepresent the abilities of members of that group”; (2) non-speaking autistic children miss out on communicative experiences necessary for message passing; and (3) anxiety and lack of familiarity with the test setting may further impede performance.

In support of the first claim, the authors turn to the field of cultural studies, citing a classic paper by Labov and another by Cole and Bruner that date back to the 1970s. These papers discuss how test performance may be affected by cultural context.^6,7 The authors also cite Heinrich and Norenzayan, who discuss how empirical psychology has been has been skewed by subjects coming predominantly from industrialized western societies.⁸ Neither these papers, nor Jaswal et al, connect the dots to message passing tests or to individuals with autism. 

Regarding the second claim, the authors state that children who can talk, in contrast to non-speakers, “receive years of prompting and feedback from adults on how to report information their interlocutor does not know.” This, they assert, “is the essence of a message passing test.” (Actually, it is information that is unfamiliar to the facilitator, not to the person asking questions, that is essential to message passing). Their one citation, Nelson and Fivush (2004), specifically addresses autobiographical memory; message passing tests typically involve semantic memory (identifying the names of objects; answering factual questions).⁹ Furthermore, as Nelson and Fivush note, children report autobiographical memories “at about 18-20 months of age”—well before the hypothetical “years of prompting and feedback” that the authors claim is prerequisite.¹⁰ As for reporting information that their interlocutor does not know, as Baker and Greenfield (1988) found, children as young as 17 months, even at the one-word stage, use language to highlight new information.¹¹

The author’s third claim is that the “unfamiliar experimental setting”, combined with “elevated levels of anxiety common in autism”, may help explain difficulties with message passing tests. The anxiety defense is belied by (1) the care taken in many of the tests to make subjects as comfortable as possible¹² (in particular, there is no mounting of eye-trackers to subjects’ heads), and (2) the unlikelihood that anxiety would lead—let alone enable—subjects to type out something that the facilitator saw and the typist didn’t. As for “unfamiliar test setting” issues, the authors cite Cardinal et al’s (1996) study in which message passing performance improved over multiple sessions.¹³ Error rates, however, remained high, and the study has been criticized for several design flaws.¹⁴ 

6. Labov, W. The logic of nonstandard English in Language and Poverty: Perspectives on a Theme (ed. Williams, F.) 153–189 (Academic Press, 1970).
7. Cole, M. & Bruner, J. S. Cultural differences and inferences about psychological processes. Am. Psychol. 26, 867–876 (1971).
8. Henrich, J., Heine, S. J. & Norenzayan, A. The weirdest people in the world? Behav. Brain Sci. 33, 61–83 (2010).
9. Nelson, K. & Fivush, R. The emergence of autobiographical memory: A social cultural developmental theory. Psychol. Rev. 111, 486–511 (2004).
10. Nelson, K. & Fivush, R. The emergence of autobiographical memory: A social cultural developmental theory. Psychol. Rev. 111, 484 (2004).
11. Baker, N. D. & Greenfield, P. M. The Development of New and Old Information in Young Children’s Early Language. Language Sciences, Vol 10, No 1, 3-34, (1988).
12. Saloviita, T., Lepannen, M., & Ojalammi, U. Authorship in facilitated communication: An analysis of 11 cases. Augmentive and Alternative Communication, 3, 213-25 (2014).
13. Cardinal, D. N., Hanson, D. & Wakeham, J. Investigation of authorship in facilitated communication. Ment. Retard. 34, 231–242 (1996).
14. Mostert, Mark P. Facilitated Communication Since 1995: A Review of Published Studies. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Vol. 31, No. 3, 287-313 (2001).

One weird side effect of the research I did for my critique is that John Henrich’s “The Weirdest People In The World” is now lying on my coffee table.

Let me connect the dots…

When Henrich expanded his original article (see footnote 8) into a book that came out earlier this fall–about how WEIRD cultures became WEIRD (White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic)–I was primed to notice. Each review caught my eye or ear, and I learned, among other things, that the book connects the dots between the dismantling by the Catholic Church of kinship-based societies and the weird/WEIRD characteristics of Western societies. Intrigued, I was sold–and promptly bought.

I haven’t read the book yet, but I doubt that Henrich connects any dots over to Facilitated Communication and message passing tests in autism. Indeed, if he were to learn that his original article had been cited as part of an argument that “Eye-tracking reveals agency in assisted autistic communication”, I think he would find that downright…

weird.