Hank Schlinger- Lessons from Clever Hans for Claims of Communicative Abilities in Nonverbal Individuals with Autism

1.0 Type II CE Credits

This presentation was recorded at the 2015 CCBS West Coast Conference on Autism.

About the presentation:

Ever since Facilitated Communication (FC) crashed onto the shores of the U.S. in the early 1990s, remarkable claims of sophisticated communicative abilities in otherwise nonverbal people with autism have proliferated. FC itself has morphed into other forms, including the so-called Rapid Prompting method. However, regardless of the name, all of these techniques have one thing in common: They claim to show that previously nonverbal people with autism are in fact highly verbal and expressive so much so that the diagnosis of autism is sometimes questioned. This is not the first time in history in which remarkable claims of communication have been made about nonverbal individuals. Perhaps the most famous case was that of a horse in Germany around the turn of the 20th century, named Clever Hans. In this talk, Dr. Schlinger describes the story of Clever Hans, including the experiments carried out by the German psychologist, Oskar Pfungst, which revealed the nature of Hans’ cleverness, and its lessons for recent claims of remarkable communicativeness in people with autism. Dr. Schlinger urges the same level of scientific scrutiny regarding these claims as with Clever Hans, and suggest that all stakeholders in autism should approach remarkable claims skeptically and scientifically.

Learning Objectives:

•  Upon successful completion of this course, participants will be able to describe how claims of Clever Hans’ communicative abilities were tested.
• Upon successful completion of this course, I was able to describe what Facilitated Communication (FC) is, including its offshoots (e.g., Rapid Prompting).
• Upon successful completion of this course, I was able to describe how FC and its offshoots are examples of the Clever Hans effect and how such claims can be (or have been) tested.