Abdication Patterns in FCed Individuals: A review of Bebko, Perry, and Bryson (1996)
I’m taking a little break from reviewing the Telepathy Tapes (see links below) because I wanted to talk about the issue of “abdication” by individuals being subjected to FC.
One of our readers (thank you!) mentioned an “abdication pattern” in individuals being subjected to FC. I didn’t remember hearing the term before, but the person was telling me how individuals being subjected to FC performed better on some tasks independently (e.g. without their facilitators) than they did while being facilitated. This, of course, piqued my curiosity. And when I came across the term a second time in reviewing the Dayan and Minnes article about ethical issues related to FC in a prior blog post, I decided I needed to investigate further.
Image by Marco Bianchetti
By following the citations listed at the end of the Dayan and Minnes report, I found an article titled “Multiple Method Validation Study of Facilitated Communication: II. Individual Differences and Subgroup Results,” written by James M. Bebko, Adrienne Perry, and Susan Bryson. The article was already listed in the Critiques of Pro-FC Articles section of our website, but I have reread the article and, perhaps, with a deeper understanding of research design and of FC in general, I am seeing it in a different light.
It appears Bebko et al. were the first to coin the term “abdication pattern,” which they discovered by examining patterns of FC-generated responses under multiple conditions in a 6-week study. Their goal for the study was to 1) explore the individual contributions of the facilitator and the student during FC use and 2) answer the question “are the productions actually those of the client, or are they influenced unintentionally by the facilitator?”
Unlike many studies of FC, which tend to use a single-design, Bebko et al. employed several activities that explored the validity of FC using five different methodologies. The report I’m discussing today focused on three of the methods: setwork design, headphones design, and receptive vocabulary design.
Researchers at the O.D. Heck Center in Schenectady, NY conducting a blind message-passing test to explore authorship in FC. (Image from Prisoners of Silence, 1993)
Briefly, in the setwork design, the students were presented either a word or a picture (e.g., colored photograph) of a familiar object for a few seconds and then asked to identify that word or picture from a set of five either by pointing or spelling the word without referencing the original word or picture. Students were tested under four conditions:
FC and facilitator informed (e.g., the facilitator was aware of the test stimuli)
FC and facilitator not informed (e.g., the facilitator was not aware of the test stimuli)
Independent (no FC) and facilitator informed
Independent (no FC) and facilitator not informed
There were four levels of difficulty in the setwork design, which could be adapted based on the students’ abilities:
The individual was shown a picture and asked to identify it from a set of five pictures
The individual was shown a word and asked to identify it from a set of five pictures
The individual was shown a picture and asked to identify it from a set of five words
The individual was shown a picture and asked to spell the word
The result of the setwork design was that, even though all 20 participants started at level 1, none of the students were able to move to level 4. In other words, despite anecdotal claims that the students could spell fluently using FC, none of the students could demonstrate the skill during the testing. While there was a wide range of performance among the individual participants, the researchers found patterns of facilitator influence when 1) the performance in the FC/informed condition was notably higher than in the other conditions, and 2) when FC improved performance only when the facilitators knew the information being requested. They also noted that, for some of the students, the accuracy of the responding dropped when FC was used, which they termed an “abdication” pattern. The pattern occurred in some of the more proficient independent communicators as they “turned over a degree of responsibility for the communication to the facilitator.” (p. 30) The researchers noted that this passivity 1) would make students more prone to influence, and 2) accounted for both a decrease in performance when facilitators did not know the responses and an increase in the accuracy of responses when facilitators had access to the test stimuli.
Image by Jean-Philippe Delberghe
In the headphones design, the student was tasked with pointing (with facilitation) to one of three pictures presented auditorily through a small desk-top speaker. The facilitator wore headphones and was simultaneously presented with a word that matched the student’s word, was a different word, or was a neutral word (e.g., zed). The design did not include an unfacilitated condition to provide a measure of the students’ ability to respond independently. The researcher(s) in the study also wore headphones and heard only white noise that masked what the student and facilitator heard. Patterns that emerged in this design included:
Responses corresponding with what the student heard
Responses corresponding with what the facilitator heard
Responses corresponding with item(s) that no one heard. (This sounds like facilitator guesses to me)
Responses that were most accurate when the facilitators heard the same information as the students
The researchers reported that their findings in the headphones condition appeared to “support the validity of FC” in 9 students whose performance was “above chance levels” with “no difference when both partners or only one knew the information.” However, the researchers failed to include a test condition that would determine students’ ability to spell target words independently and without facilitation, so could not rule in or rule out the efficacy of FC support.
The researchers also noted that, when facilitators were aware that some of the information they heard would be neutral or different than what their students would hear, the facilitators were more cautious in their facilitation. This, in turn, resulted in fewer instances of facilitator-controlled responses than in the “setwork” condition previously discussed.
Image from Pearson Assessments
In the final design discussed in this report, the students were given two versions of the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test – Revised (PPVT-R) on separate days to see if they could replicate the results found in another pro-FC study (Calculator and Singer, 1992). Calculator and Singer were among the first researchers in the U.S. to test FC and claimed to have demonstrated independent communication in 3 of 5 facilitated individuals. However, questions later arose as to how well the tests were controlled, casting doubts on the test results.
In Bebko et al.’s test, the students were asked to identify one of four line-drawings corresponding to a word spoken by the researcher. Facilitators wore earplugs and earphones with white noise to mask spoken utterances by the researcher and/or students, but they were not prevented from seeing the test plates. The researchers found that all the students showed difficulty in receptive language skills and concluded that their findings did not replicate those of Calculator and Singer.
Bebko et al. noted that, although they found instances of facilitator influence in each of the test designs in their study (setwork, headphones, PPVT), the facilitator influence was “far less extensive” than what had been reported in other studies. They attributed this to the fact that facilitators in previous studies (e.g., Wheeler et al, 1993) already believed FC “worked” before testing it. This belief, they posited, resulted in “potentially stronger facilitator effects.”
Facilitators in the Bebko et al. study, on the other hand, had received the same 2-day FC training from Syracuse University trained facilitators, but where told from the outset that they would be tested for authorship. Still, the facilitators, who had worked with their students for six weeks before the tests, were “surprised and disappointed over the lack of validity found for FC.” This, perhaps, speaks to the power of belief as facilitators become emotionally invested in the technique even if exposed to FC over a short period of time.
Bebko et al. conducted a follow-up to the overall test 7 months after the first sessions. They reported the following patterns:
Facilitator influence increased with the length of time facilitating.
The lowest accuracy rates occurred in conditions where the facilitator did not know the information given to the student and supported concerns regarding abdication.
There was little clear support for the validity of FC in enhancing communication over communication that students produced independently
The abdication pattern, to me, at least, seems to be both the most notable and concerning of their observations. They wrote:
…on trials when FC was introduced and facilitators did not know what the child had been shown, performance decreased considerably. It is possible that for these students, FC somehow interfered with their responding. (p. 39) (emphasis mine)
Image by Elizabeth Kay
The researchers noted that while participating in independent tasks, the students in the study appeared to attend more directly to the task at hand (e.g., selecting letters independently), but their attention wandered during FC use and their overall performance was affected. In other words, along with facilitator cueing, student passivity/abdication may make them vulnerable to facilitator influence and control over letter selection. They noted that “while physical prompts are clearly useful for the teaching of new skills, anything but the immediate fading of them may be detrimental to students’ learning” particularly for students with autism who are known to have difficulties generalizing newly learned responses. (emphasis mine, p. 40) This dependence on the facilitator, the authors warned, indicated a “clear risk factor” in the use of FC and could be a detriment to the independent communication of individuals being subjected to its use.
In conclusion, I was surprised by a second look at this study. I’m sure I read it before adding it to the website, but the gravity of the results, for some reason, did not really sink in. I see commenters on social media rejecting the “old” studies and, while I would love for current-day facilitators to submit to reliably controlled authorship studies—particularly for the FC variants Spelling to Communicate, Rapid Prompting Method, and Spellers Method—I think there is some value in revisiting the FC studies that already exist. I’ve been researching FC for a long time, but every once in a while a concept stops me in my tracks.
I think most facilitators believe they are doing more good than harm when subjecting their clients or loved ones to the technique, but what if those behavioral changes, the increase in passivity with FC use that is so often reported as (and associated with) the “success” of FC is really the person’s abdication of their contribution to the communication process? What if, as Bebko et al. suggest, because of this passivity, facilitator influence increases with time, not decreases? Personally, I think that it is horrible to think of the individuals losing their already limited ability to communicate independently as they are subjected to a discredited technique that has associated with it a long and documented history of harms.
References and Recommended Reading
Blog Posts Reviewing the Telepathy Tapes
FC’s Lesser Known Side: Thoughts about the Telepathy Tapes (Episode 1)
Proving Facilitator Authorship in FC/RPM messages: Thoughts about the Telepathy Tapes (Episode 3)
Bebko, J. M., Perry, A., & Bryson, S. (1996). Multiple method validation study of facilitated communication: II. Individual differences and subgroups results. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 26, 19-42. DOI: 10.1007/BF02276233
Camarata, Stephen. (2023), April 17). Stolen Voices: Facilitated Communication Devalues Autism: Autistic people using AAC have a right to message authorship protections. Psychology Today.
Celiberti, D., Wilis, J., & Daly, K. (2024). A treatment summary of Facilitated Communication. Science in Autism Treatment, 21 (7).
Hemsley, B., Shane, H., Todd, J.T., Schlosser, R., and Lang, R. (2018, May 22). It’s time to stop exposing people to the dangers of facilitated communication. The Conversation.
Jacobson, J.W., Mulick, J.A., and Schwartz, A.A. (1995, September). A history of facilitated communication: Science, pseudoscience, and antiscience. Science Working Group on Facilitated Communication. American Psychologist. 50 (9), 750-765.
Lang, R., Schlosser, R., and Koul, R. (2023, September 19). Facilitated Communication and its Variants: Evidence in Context. Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention.
Prior, Margot and Cummins, Robert. (1992). Questions about Facilitated Communication and Autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Vol. 22 (2); 331-337.
Todd, J. T. (2016). Old horses in new stables: Rapid prompting, facilitated communication, science, ethics, and the history of magic, in R. Foxx & J.A. Mulick (Eds). Controversial Therapies for Autism and Intellectual Disabilities: Fad, Fashion, and Science in Professional Practice, 2nd edition, New York, NY: Routledge, pp. 372-409.
Wheeler, DL, Jacobson, JW, Paglieri, RA, and Schwartz, AA. (1993). An experimental assessment of facilitated communication. Mental Retardation. Vol 31 (1), 49-60.