Today’s blog post is a continuation of a discussion about the ideomotor response and the extent that it can (or cannot) explain cueing in Facilitated Communication (FC). I’ve provided links to other blog posts on this topic below.

*"The Boston planchette ... first made in Boston in 1860 ... For sale by G.W. Cottrell, 36 Cornhill, Boston." (from Wikimedia Commons)*

As I mentioned previously, early critics of FC recognized it as a form of automatic writing often associated with the use of a planchette or Ouija board. As Kathleen Dillon noted in a 1993 article called Facilitated Communication, Autism, and Ouija, the two practices share many commonalities, including but not limited to:

Use of a letter board with alpha-numeric characters
Use of planchette (in the case of FC, the “planchette” is the pointer finger of the subject while the facilitator lightly touches some part of the subject’s arm)
Claims the movement comes from an entity other than the facilitator or the person touching the planchette
Facilitators/planchette users are often unaware of the extent to which they are controlling the movements (e.g., letter selection)
Facilitators and Ouija board users are discouraged from testing authorship (e.g., facilitator influence/control)
Typographical errors, phonetic spellings, or unusual utterances are used as “proof” that the messages are real and not made up by the facilitator/planchette user (without allowing for errors made due to pressure exerted by the facilitator or planchette user)
Messages (often garbled letters) are interpreted by the facilitator/planchette user after the spelling session is completed.
Facilitators/planchette users remember the “hits” or times when they believed letter selection was “correct,” and forget or ignore the “misses” or times when letter selection produced incorrect or fictitious information.
Skepticism or doubt expressed by the facilitator or planchette user (supposedly) impedes communication.

The facilitator “supports” the student’s arm at the wrist, creating a pendulum. (Syracuse Training video, 1991).

Historically, this led to some discussion by FC researchers about automatism or actions “performed without the doer’s intention or awareness” (e.g., the ideomotor response). As I discussed in my previous blog post, whereas small, involuntary, often nonconscious, motor activities (e.g., the ideomotor response) of facilitators can affect letter selection under certain circumstances, it is not likely that these small movements fully explain prolonged use of FC and the broader cues facilitators provide on an on-going basis to their clients or loved ones during letter selection (See An FC Primer). Nevertheless, many researchers noted in their studies the tendency of facilitators not to understand or be aware of the extent to which they controlled letter selection. There are several factors that could explain this seeming lack of awareness (of their own behavior) in facilitators:

By its design, FC involves multitasking for the facilitator (e.g., holding a letter board, positioning/redirecting their client during the activity, calling out letters selected, asking/answering questions) which reduces the facilitator’s ability to maintain awareness of his or her own behaviors,
A desire to help that enables facilitators to ignore or downplay doubts about authorship (under the guise of “presuming competence”),
Admonishments by FC leaders not to test the technique for facilitator cueing under reliably controlled conditions (e.g., message-passing tests where the facilitator is unaware of the content being discussed).
Facilitators are untrained or unaware of how their own physical, verbal, and auditory cues can reinforce certain behaviors (e.g., pointing on cue) with positive reinforcements (also known as operant conditioning). As Katherine has pointed out in previous blog posts (here and here), there are existing evidence-based practices (e.g., Applied Behavior Analysis) that employ systematic and predetermined protocols to fade cueing by assistants. Facilitators believe they are fading support by moving from the wrist to the shoulder, for example, without understanding that they can (and do) provide cues for letter selection subtly and, at times, without touching the person being subjected to FC.
Facilitators attribute authorship to an outside source (e.g., the person being subjected to FC) because it “feels” like they are not contributing to letter selection.
Motivated reasoning/self-delusion (e.g., facilitators tend to remember the “hits” and forget the “misses” in an attempt to make FC “work”).

I recently read a book about the writing process called Bird by Bird by Anne Lemott. In it, Lemott observes: “Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.” (Lemott, p. 114).

Anyone who has taken a writing workshop knows that there are “tricks” writers employ to get words (or as Lemott puts it “the messy first draft”) onto the page. A common writing exercise is to set a timer for, say, 5 minutes, and write (often to a writing prompt provided by the instructor) without stopping until the timer goes off. The idea is to keep your hand moving the whole time. If you can’t think of something to write, you write “I can’t think of anything to write”—or whatever pops into your mind whether it fits the writing prompt or not. I don’t necessarily buy into the hypnotism argument, but I have experienced stream of consciousness-type writing (separate from when I was facilitating) that I believe is akin to “automatic” writing. I’d describe it as a relaxed semi-conscious state of mind (sometimes referred to as “flow”). I use “semi-conscious” here in the sense that I was highly focused on the writing activity to the point of being able to temporarily block out or ignore other distractions until the timer signaled that time was up. Ideally, during this exercise, writers pay minimal attention to the actual words produced on the page and just let thoughts come and go uncensored. (Much like facilitators do when they think FC-generated messages are coming from someone other than themselves).

Most writing produced in this “automatic” or “stream-of-consciousness” way is nonsensical or junk, but often, when the writer reviews the passage(s) later (in the more conscious, deliberately critical, editing stage), he or she often will discover bits and pieces of ideas—connections made between two concepts or events that seem surprising or unique—that can be further explored or exploited during a more conscious editing stage (e.g., sometimes “retrofitting” meaning into a sentence or paragraph that, on its own, does not make sense). It shouldn’t be too much of a leap to understand that facilitators, too, exhibit these shifts in mindset during the “automatic” writing stages of an FC session.

I recall a scene from the 1993 documentary “Prisoners of Silence” where an excited mother describes her (seemingly religious-like) transformation into FC believer. To me, this characterizes the stream-of-consciousness nature of a FC-generated string of letters and the “editing” process where sense is made of what was purportedly typed:

(Ms. Hayduke): My validation that it was Stacy who was communicating came a few weeks ago. Now my husband has this attitude about her and he’s found out that if he does this (e.g., pinching his nose and wiggling it), it absolutely makes her laugh. She just goes crazy. He wiggles his nose. So now when they greet each other it’s like this. And so now she’s in love with Dad and I’ve been trying to teach her how to type out “Dad” and I will admit that, yes, I’m taking her hand and I’m going, “D-A-D,” and I’m, “Please, Stace let’s learn how to do ‘Dad’.” And she won’t learn “Dad.” But one day, Dad wasn’t in the house and she came home and she’s looking around, trying to find out where he is. And so she goes, “Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh!” And she gets her board and she starts pointing at the board. And I said, “What do you want to tell me? What do you want to tell me?” And she typed out, I-M-S-N-O-S.” I said, “What are you saying?” and it’s simple. It’s shorthand. “I miss nose.” We have been trying to teach her the word for Dad and she has created her own word for Dad. (Prisoner’s of Silence, 1993, emphasis mine)

In this instance, the mother/facilitator both downplays or ignores the fact that she knows on some level that she is moving her child’s hand and retrofits the nonsensical string of letters IMSNOS into something meaningful. For me, this example is heartbreaking because it speaks to the desperation many parents feel/felt to communicate (in words) with their children and how these emotions interfere with recognizing the degree to which they control letter selection.

Equipment developed by Michael Faraday to explain the ideomotor effect on turning tables. *The Illustrated London News*, July 16, 1853, page 35. (from Wikimedia Commons)

In addition to providing cues to their clients and loved ones, facilitators may also exhibit another characteristic that contributes to FC-generated, “automatic” messages. In a 1993 article titled Facilitator Control as Automatic Behavior: A Verbal Behavior Analysis, Genae A. Hall discusses a “key concept in automatic writing”: self-editing. Self-editing may come in the form of censoring one’s own thoughts (e.g., withholding a negative comment or refraining from swearing in a public place). In situations where self-editing is relaxed, people may express thoughts they might otherwise censor. This self-editing “appears to be largely self-interverbal, with a small amount of self-echoic control.” In other words, writers (and I’d argue facilitators) carry on an internal conversation with themselves. And, as Hall suggests, the facilitator, can generate “long or short chains of unedited verbal behavior, and perform[ing] the functions of both speaker and listener.”

Because facilitators are taught not to question FC-generated messages, have a limited understanding of the extent to which they provide cues to their clients or loved ones during letter selection, and experience a state of relaxed self-editing as they attribute letter selection to a person outside themselves (e.g., a client or loved one), they often “fail to respond to their own typing behaviors.” Messages obtained this way, when—even moments later—looked at objectively, may seem unusual, strange, or otherwise novel to the facilitator. And, given that they are motivated to make FC “work,” facilitators often use rationalizations to make sense of the nonsensical.

As we’ve seen in these first two blog posts, the topic of facilitator cueing is much more complicated than probably any of us realized when FC became a topic of interest 30+ years ago. I’d argue that much more happens within the minds of facilitators than researchers understand (largely because facilitators refuse to participate in authorship testing or interviews). Personally, I’d love to see more facilitator-focused studies like Daniel Wegner, Valerie Fuller, and Betsy Sparrow’s Clever Hands: Uncontrolled Intelligence in Facilitated Communication, which I will discuss further in the next installment in this series on the ideomotor response and facilitator cueing.

References and recommended reading:

Beals, Katharine P. (2024, February 1). Can message-passing anecdotes tell us anything about the validity of RPM and S2C? Evidence-Based Communication Assessment and Intervention. DOI: 10.1080/17489539.2023.2290298.

Burgess, C.A., Kirsch, I., Shane, H., Niederauer, K.L., Graham, S.M., Bacon, A. (January 1998). Facilitated Communication as an Ideomotor Response. Psychological Science, 9(1), 71-74. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40063250

Dillon, K. (1993). Facilitated Communication, Autism, and Ouija. The Skeptical Inquirer, 17 (3), 281-287.

Hall, G.A. (1993). Facilitator control as automatic behavior: A verbal behavior analysis. Analysis of Verbal Behavior, 11, 89-97.

Heinzen, T., Lilienfeld, S., Nolan, S.A. (2015). The Horse That Won’t Go Away: Clever Hans, Facilitated Communication, and the Need for Clear Thinking. McMillan Learning ISBN 978-1464145742

Hyman, Ray. (2003, August 26). How people are fooled by ideomotor action. Quackwatch.

Kezuka E. (October 1997). The Role of Touch in Facilitated Communication. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 27(5), 571-593. DOI: 10.1023/A:1025882127478

Spitz, H. (1997). Nonconscious Movements: From Mystical Messages to Facilitated Communication. Routledge. ISBN 978-0805825633

Wegner, D.M., Fuller, V.A., and Sparrow, B. (2003, July). Clever hands: uncontrolled intelligence in facilitated communication, Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 85 (1), 5-19. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.85.1.5

Select Blog Posts on the Topic of Cueing:

ABA vs. FC: What ABA knows about autism, instructional needs, and the harmful effects of inadvertent cues

An FC Primer

Clever Hans: It’s Not About the Horse

How Effectively Does the Ideomotor Response Explain Cueing in Facilitated Communication? - Part 1

Myths about myths, validity, and natural message-passing tests, Part 1

Myths about myths, validity, and natural message-passing tests, Part II

The under-appreciated power of involuntary muscle movements—A review of Herman Spitz