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[APPLAUSE] MORTON ANN GERNSBACHER: Thank you so much for that amazingly gracious introduction, and thank you so much for inviting me here today. I'm absolutely honored to be giving this talk. As Steve mentioned, I study cognitive neuroscience. And what a great era it is to be involved in brain research because the public just loves brains. From just the books that are sold on amazon.com, you can learn how to Use Your Brain, Use Both Sides of Your Brain, and Challenge Your Brain.
You can also find out how to Boost Your Brain's Power, Feed Your Brain, Power Up Your Brain, even Beef Up Your Brain. But we're also told to remember that we are not our brain, However, if you want to, you can change your brain-- in fact, Change Your Brain to Change Your Body. You can Save Your Brain, Rewire Your Brain, and more specifically, Rewire Your Brain for Love. You can Educate Your Brain, Entertain Your Brain, Stress-Proof Your Brain, Evolve Your Brain, Unchain Your Brain, even Outsmart Your Brain. Sounds pretty clever.
But Don't Check Your Brains at the Door Because you need to train your brain about food, and Train Your Brain For Success, and train your brain for wealth, prosperity, and financial security, train your brain the Green Beret way, and train your brain even more. And if all of this is confusing, you're in luck because Amazon also sells a Training Your Brain for Dummies manual.
And I promise I'm not making any of this up. These are actual titles of actual books that are sold on Amazon. And they illustrate just how much we want to read about anything to do with the brain.
Journalists are also aware of our passion for reading about the brain, riffing off the 1980s public service announcement--
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- This is your brain. This is drugs.
[SIZZLING]
This is your brain on drugs.
[END PLAYBACK]
MORTON ANN GERNSBACHER: Well, we now have a whole slew of articles like this one that Popular Science offered us.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- This is your brain. This is your brain on love.
[END PLAYBACK]
MORTON ANN GERNSBACHER: And a couple of years ago, The New York Times offered us "Your Brain on Computers" and then, more recently, "Your Brain on E-Books and Smartphone Apps." Time Magazine offered us "Your Brain on Laughter;" NPR, "Your Brain on God;" Psychology Today, "Your Brain on Food." And even TED conferences got into the act with "Your Brain on Improv."
Websites are also honed into our love of the brain. And they seem to be mining this "your brain on meme" for click bait. So for example, Mashable, which is a social media website-- they lured readers with the headlines, "Your Brain on YouTube." New York Times Sunday Review-- it was "Your Brain on Reading." For a website called The Credits, it was "Your Brain at the Movies." And from coupons.com, "Your Brain on Coupons."
During the last election cycle, there was great interest in "Your Brain on Politics." and this Science Daily press release claimed that, quote, "Neuroscience reveals brain differences between Democrats and Republicans." A research study described in USA Today claimed that brain differences can be found based on faith. And another study described on PositScience claimed brain differences between morning people and night people.
So the list of claimed brain differences between various groups of people grows every day. Therefore, in my talk today, I'm going to outline when we as scientists should accentuate putative brain differences and when we probably shouldn't. I'm also going to talk about why we as individuals should accept the brain differences that do truly exist. And honoring Professor Ricchiuti's passion for public policy, I will conclude by talking about how we as a society can accommodate brain differences.
So I want to begin by focusing on an area of putative brain diversity that's held popular mystique for centuries-- the potential difference between male versus female brains. This issue of Scientific American, which I, along with co-editor Steve Ceci, shepherded through during our tenure at psychological science in the public interest was based upon-- the article was based upon a juried review of previously published research exploring putative differences between males and females.
Our starting point was the stereotypic assumption illustrated by this stock video that men's brains are hard wired for analytical careers, such as being math and science professors at Harvard. Whereas women-- I don't know. Maybe we're hardwired for growing gardens or something flowery in our head. I still don't quite understand-- maybe florists-- this stock video.
AUDIENCE: Aesthetic.
MORTON ANN GERNSBACHER: Aah, aesthetic. Thank you. Thank you. In another ABS journal, Current Directions, author Cornelia Fine reminded the public that centuries before our current stable of fancy brain imaging tools, like the University of Wisconsin MRI scanner shown here, other tools were used to identify brain differences, including scales. In the Victorian era, the quote, "missing five ounces," the difference in weight between the average male and the average female brain, was considered the source of women's intellectual inferiority.
Well, on average, female brains still weigh less. And on average, a female brain has a thicker cortex, which is the outermost sheet of neural tissue. But these days, most neuroscientists no longer interpret the fact that women have thicker cortices than men or conversely that men have thinner cortices than women as a deficit. It's just a difference.
However, such a progressive interpretation of difference as diversity rather than difference as always deficit doesn't extend to all other groups. As I reviewed in one of my APS presidential columns, when one research study reported that autistic persons had thicker cortices than non-autistic persons, the finding was interpreted as an autistic deficit. And when another research study reported the exact opposite finding, that autistic persons had thinner cortices than non-autistic persons, that finding was also interpreted as an autistic deficit.
Now, in neither case was the effect size of the difference larger than what's seen between males and females. But such "damned if you do and damned if you don't" interpretations pervade the neuroimaging of autism literature. Indeed, a few years ago, one of my PhD students, Jennifer Stevenson, examined all of the autism-related neuroimaging studies in the literature at that time. And the list included 36 studies with data on the cerebellum, 32 studies with data on the superior temporal gyrus and sulcus, 30 studies with data on the inferior frontal gyrus, 29 studies with data on the amygdala, 27 on the fusiform gyrus, 24 on the striatum, another 24 on the cingulate gyrus, and another 24 on the hippocampus.
To make a long story of a lot of meta-analyses short, for none of these brain regions was there a consistent pattern of results across studies. There were inconsistent findings among the functional brain imaging literature. There were inconsistent findings among the structural or volumetric imaging literature. Not one brain region showed a consistent pattern across studies. But whenever a difference between autistic and non-autistic participants was reported, even if the direction of the difference conflicted with the finding of another study, the difference was always interpreted as an autistic deficit.
For example, among studies examining the volume of the hippocampus, six studies reported that autistic participants had larger hippocampi than non-autistic participants. And in each of these six studies, the autistic participants' larger hippocampi were interpreted as a deficit. Another three studies reported just the opposite-- smaller hippocampi.
And again, in each of these studies, the smaller hippocampi were interpreted as a deficit. And another study reported no difference between autistic and non-autistic participants' hippocampi. And this study suggested, you know, it must be other brain regions that are to blame for participants' deficits.
As another example, among studies examining task-related functional activation in the superior temporal sulcus or gyrus, nine studies-- greater task related activation must be a deficit. Another seven studies, just the opposite-- lesser task-related activation must be a deficit. And two other studies split the difference.
As a third example, among studies examining task-related functional activation in the amygdala, five studies reported that autistic participants produce greater task-related activation-- deficit. Three studies, less activation-- deficit. And seven studies found no difference between autistic and non-autistic participants. And many of these studies suggested that the autistic participants must have been compensating for there to be no observable differences.
Inconsistency characterized all the brain regions that Jennifer Stevenson reviewed. And perhaps those inconsistent findings are attributable to some of the methodological pitfalls that characterize cognitive and cognitive neuroscience-- for example, small sample sizes and what's known as p-hacking. But whenever a difference was observed, regardless of whether it was consistent or not, the difference was always attributed to an autistic deficit.
Similarly, a couple of years ago in the APS journal perspectives on psychological science, I reviewed the evidence for whether mirror neuron dysfunction underlies autism. And this body of data was also characterized by inconsistencies. For example, one study measured autistic and non-autistic participants' brain activity during imitation and reported that autistic participants demonstrated greater task-related activity in the inferior parietal region. And that must mean that they have broken mirror neurons. But another study using the exact same task reported that autistic participants demonstrated lesser task-related activity, and that was suggested to be in the same region as suggested as evidence for broken mirror neurons.
Similarly, another study that examined brain activity during observation, autistic participants demonstrating greater task-related activity in the inferior frontal gyrus-- that was interpreted as evidence for broken mirror neurons. And another study using the same task reported less task-related activity. That was interpreted as evidence for broken mirror neurons.
I think we as neuroscientists can do better. I think we can be more sophisticated when we conceptualize diverse brains because attributing every difference regardless of the direction of the effect to a minority group's deficit is cheap, and I think it's pretty boring. And I think a novel and considerably more fruitful approach has been demonstrated by an exciting series of neuroimaging studies of blind individuals.
So although the brain isn't nearly as regionally functional as our color-coded schematics in our textbooks lead us to believe, some of the most explicit functional specificity is found in the lobe farthest to the back-- the occipital lobe. And in sighted people, the occipital lobe shows strong specificity for processing visual information. But what about blind people, particularly people like Stevie wonder, who have been blind since birth?
If the occipital lobe's usual job is to handle visual processing, what do the occipital lobes of blind people do? I think it would be boring and rather foolish to give blind people a bunch of visual stimuli. And when the blind participant's occipital lobes fail to show task-related activity, then to pop the champagne, and write up the study, and conclude that you have found a blind deficit. I think a more interesting approach is to investigate what type stimuli do the occipital lobes of congenitally blind individuals respond to? And several recent neuroimaging studies have done just that. And they reported that the brains of blind people are amazingly flexible organs. And they use this amazingly prime real estate known as the occipital lobe for all sorts of other functions, such as higher-order reasoning, judgment, decision making, and even my favorite, spoken language comprehension.
In my mind, that discovery provides a stellar model for how we as neuroscientists can more fruitfully go about studying brain differences. I think there are similarly fruitful models demonstrated recently by developmentalists who studied children with disabilities other than autism-- for example, Susan Goldin-Meadow and her masterful approach to studying deaf children. Most compelling are the deaf children Susan studies who were exposed neither to a spoken language-- because they're deaf-- nor are they exposed to a sign language because their parents resist learning sign language.
And these children develop what's known as home sign, which is a unique and interesting gesture system. And quite curiously, it doesn't resemble their hearing parents' gestures. Rather the home signs resemble other deaf children's home signs, even if those other deaf children live halfway around the world.
So rather than describing deaf home signers as children who have a deficit in learning their parents' gesture system or even deaf home signers as children who have a deficit in hearing, Susan Goldin-Meadow traipsed around the world to discover that deaf children's home signs are actually quite meaningful and that they can masterfully tell us all about the resilience of the language system in human communication.
Another example is represented by Miguel Perez-Pereira and Gina Conti-Ramsden's recent book analyzing language development and social interaction in blind children. As one of these books' reviewers notes, quote, "This book summarizes and discusses the existing and very often conflicting literature," which sounds familiar, "and concludes that blind children's language development is not just a slower version of normal development. Rather blind children's language acquisition follows a different route," unquote-- a different route rather than a deficit route.
Members of another minority have also witnessed a progression from their neuroanatomy and behavior being defined as a deficit to simply a difference. And here, I'm speaking about left handers. As many of you know, in the 19th century, left-handedness was considered extremely pathologic, and it was assumed to be an indicator of primitivism, and savagery, criminality, hence the term "sinister."
And by the middle of the 20th century, some of the cruelest of those assumptions had attenuated. For example, as developmental psychologist Gertrude Hildreth reported in 1949, parents became a bit more willing to accept that they had left-handed children, particularly in the words of Lady Gaga, if they believed they had been born that way.
But nonetheless, even as recently as 1949, when over 100 upper middle-class parents were asked, would you prefer that your child be right-handed, all but 2% indicated a strong preference for right-handed children. Similarly in 1949, parents were asked, if your child showed a left-handed tendency, would you make him shift to the right hand? And nearly three fourths of the parents said yes.
And when parents were asked, if your child showed a left-handed tendency, would you help him become a better left hander? The vast majority of the parents said no. Well, times have changed. And in Western societies at least, attitudes toward left-handedness now epitomize the United Nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities, which prescribes respect for difference and acceptance of persons with disabilities and persons with left-handedness, for that matter, because it's part of human diversity and humanity, which leads me to the second part of my talk today.
I want to tell you about a bountiful literature of behavioral studies because these studies empirically document the robust, positive effects of accepting disability as diversity. This statement, "It's important for me to accept myself as I am," is one of the key items on the Acceptance of Disability Scale, which was constructed over 40 years ago and has been used in numerous research studies around the world. The Acceptance of Disability Scale, like all good psychological scales, also includes other items, such as "I feel OK talking about my disability with others," "There are more important things in life than those my disability prevents me from doing," and "Because of my disability, I have a lot to offer other people." The Acceptance of Disability Scales comprises both positively scored items like these and negatively scored items, such as these, "My disability affects aspects of my life that I care the most about," "My disability prevents me from doing the things I want to do," or "My disability has disrupted my life greatly." Obviously, for these items, agreeing with the statement indicates a lack of acceptance of your disability.
Using the Acceptance of Disability Scale and other measures similar to it, a wealth of scientific data has been collected from persons of all ages with various disabilities in numerous countries. And unlike the morass of inconsistent brain imaging data, the body of data on acceptance of disability is remarkably consistent because each study demonstrates a positive association between acceptance of disability and positive psychological states.
So for example, one large-scale study of nearly 1,300 individuals in the US with a wide range of various disabilities demonstrates that disabled person's acceptance of disability is highly and positively correlated with their self-esteem. The strong positive relation between accepting the fact that you have a disability and your self-esteem for persons with disability is independent of the person's age, their gender, their race and ethnicity, their marital status. It's even only weakly a function of whether the person has multiple disabilities or just one.
Another series of studies using the Acceptance of Disability Scale demonstrates a related positive effect that persons who accept their disabilities have better psychological wellbeing as demonstrated in a US study of nearly 120 polio survivors and a Belgian study of nearly 100 individuals with chronic fatigue syndrome. A Dutch study of nearly 600 persons with spinal cord injury also demonstrates a strong positive correlation between acceptance of disability and psychological wellbeing.
This Dutch study as well as a Thai study and an Australian study with persons with acquired brain injury also illustrate another important principle. Acceptance of disability is frequently independent of severity of disability. So there are individuals with severe spinal cord or brain injury who fully accept their disability, and they reap the positive benefits of that acceptance. And then there are individuals with much milder injury who resist accepting their disability and therefore miss out on the benefits of acceptance.
Independence between acceptance of disability and severity of disability has also been shown for persons with chronic pain, as in a polish study of 115 persons with chronic lower-back pain and a US study of 50 persons with pain from a spinal cord injury. Multiple studies also demonstrate that quality of life for persons with disabilities is also independent of the severity of the person's disability. For example, a British study of nearly 50 adults who were disabled by prenatal exposure to thalidomide demonstrates that their quality of life is independent of objective measures of the severity of their disability. And these measures are objective because that's how they're compensated in the UK.
Quality of life is independent of objective measures of impairment. And in US study of nearly 100 adults with Parkinson's, this study also demonstrates that the primary predictor of quality of life was the person's optimism. All the studies that I have reviewed pertain to individuals themselves accepting their own disability and reaping positive effects of their own self-esteem and their own quality of life.
But frequently, I'm asked to speak to parents of children with disabilities because, perhaps in addition to being a researcher in this field, I, too, am a parent of a child with a disability. And an area in which parents are deeply interested, both those of children with and without disabilities, is stress. And here, the data could not be clearer that for parents of children with a wide range of disabilities and medical conditions, parents' stress is not related to objective measures of their children's impairments. That is parents' stress is not a function of-- its independent of the severity of their children's disabilities.
US study of nearly 100 parents of children with congenital heart disease-- parents subjectively reported stress unrelated to objective measures of the child's illness, including number of hospitalizations, operations, catheterizations, outpatient visits, even a cardiologist independent rating of the severity of the child's illness. Canadian study-- 53 mothers of children with intractable epilepsy-- parents subjectively reported stress independent of seizure type, seizure frequency, number of failed treatments, number of surgeries. US study of nearly 100 parents of children with intellectual disability-- parents subjectively reported stress unrelated to objective measures of their children's functioning, such as being high, quote, or low functioning.
100 parents of children with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, 70 Taiwanese parents of children with cerebral palsy-- parents subjectively reported stress unrelated to objective measures of their child's disability. And the same highly consistent pattern has been shown for the disability of autism. Although parents of autistic children sometimes report experiencing even more stress than parents of children with other disabilities. Parents' stress is, again, unrelated to objective measures of autism. Parents' stress unrelated to autistic children's social interaction, receptive language, expressive language, IQ and functioning, even the degree or severity of their children's objectively measured autistic traits.
In contrast to objective measures of impairment for children with autism and for children with other disabilities, their parents' stress is related to their parents' subjective judgments of the children's impairment. The more stress the parent feels, the more impaired he or she judges his or her child to be. And that probably shouldn't be too surprising given the powerful role of affect on perception. In fact, it would only be surprising if there wasn't a relationship in that regard. But this very strong relation between parents' subjectively reported stress and their subjective evaluation of their children's abilities should throw caution to any researcher who relies on parent report for any aspect of assessment because that parent report and assessment will be clouded by parental stress.
So if parents' stress isn't a function of how objectively disabled their children are, at least not as measured, then what can attenuate parents' stress? Well, in collaboration with my husband and fellow UW Psychology Professor, Hill Goldsmith, who's shown here many years ago holding many pairs of twins, and graduate student Emily Schweikert, we investigated whether parents' acceptance of their children's disability attenuated their subjectively reported levels of stress.
The disability we worked with was autism, and we modified items from the Acceptance of Disability Scale. For example, rather than parents responding to the item, "It's important for me to accept myself as I am," we asked them to respond to the item, "It's important for me to accept my child with autism as she or he is." Rather than "My disability prevents me from doing the things I want to do," "My child's autism prevents me from doing the things I want to do." Rather than the item, "My disability affects aspects of my life that I care the most about," we changed the item to be, "My child's autism affects aspects of my life that I care the most about." And rather than "Because of my disability, I have a lot to offer other people," we changed the item to be, "Because my child has autism, she or he has a lot to offer other people."
Our participants were parents of twins, one of both of whom were objectively diagnosed as autistic. And in this way, we could investigate whether parents' stress was compounded by having two children with autism versus just one. But it wasn't.
In fact, as countless other studies have shown, parents' subjectively reported stress wasn't related to any objective measure of their children's autistic abilities or disabilities. Rather parents' subjectively reported stress was solely a function of their acceptance of their children's disability of autism. The parents in our study who scored high on the Acceptance of Disability as modified Scale as well as persons with disabilities who score high on acceptance of disability are adept at reframing their situation, which, as we all know as psychologists, it's the art of stepping back from the current frame or lens through which one's viewing a situation and reconsidering that frame, reconstructing a new frame as the store window recommends. Life may not be the party we hoped for. But while we're here, we should dance.
Or as illustrated in this flyer from the Canadian Down Syndrome Society, the caption of which reads, "Chances are, he'll never cure cancer, walk on the moon, or be Prime Minister. Then again, neither will you."
[LAUGHTER]
Or, as illustrated by one of my favorite anecdotes in Nancy Siegel's study of identical twins who were reared apart-- that is through adoption, each twin was raised in a different family-- when one of the adoptive mothers was asked if her adopted child was a picky eater, the mother responded with consternation, and frustration, and exasperation.
"Oh, my goodness. She is such a picky eater. She won't eat anything, nothing, unless I put cinnamon on it. She wants to have cinnamon on everything she eats. It's bizarre. It tries my patience on a daily basis."
When the adoptive mother of this child's identical co-twin was asked the same question about her adopted daughter's eating habits, she responded calmly and evenly, "No, she's not a very picky eater at all. In fact, I think she's a great little eater. She has a very healthy appetite. I think she eats just about anything-- well, just as long as I put some cinnamon on it."
[LAUGHTER]
The cinnamon anecdote illustrates the heart and soul of the concept of accommodation, and that's the last topic I will be talking about today. Accommodation is the key to supporting disability. It's the key to enabling the diversity that disability affords.
We can classify accommodations into two broad categories. They're accommodations such as curb cuts that were initially established to level the playing ground-- literally level the playing ground for one minority group, namely persons with mobility disabilities. But in reality, although curb cuts have been incredibly important for improving the mobility of wheelchair users and scooter users, look at any street corner, and you'll see that the overwhelmingly vast majority of persons who benefit from curb cuts are not persons with disabilities, but rather bicyclists, people pushing strollers, and people pushing dollies.
Similarly, closed captions have been incredibly important for improving access to entertainment and education for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. But the majority of people who benefit from captions are not deaf or hearing impaired. Rather the majority of people who benefit from captions are hearing people-- and not just hearing people at bars, or airports, or in work cubicles who want to watch YouTube without their bosses listening.
Rather numerous studies show that captions increase reading and literacy skills for hearing children learning to read. Other studies show that captions increase language comprehension skills for hearing persons learning a second language. Other studies show that captions increase language comprehension and memory for hearing people of all ages and in particular for persons who are my age and older. Indeed, every single study in the literature-- every single one demonstrates that captions are beneficial to a wide range of hearing people.
In contrast to accommodations like captions and curb cuts, which although initially implemented to aid only disabled people and then co-opted and used predominantly by non-disabled people, there are accommodations that remain specific to a disability, such as Braille for blind people and sign language for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. And this, for you non-signers, is--
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[THE WHITE STRIPES, "WE'RE GOING TO BE FRIENDS"]
- (SINGING) Fall is here, hear the yell, back to school, ring the bell.
Brand-new shoes, walking blues, climb the fence, books and pens.
I can tell that we are going to be friends. I can tell that we are going to be friends.
[END PLAYBACK]
MORTON ANN GERNSBACHER: "We Are Going to Be Friends" by The White Stripes. You guys recognize that on first blush, I'm sure. Accommodations like Braille and sign language that remain specific to disability groups are often still shrouded in stigma.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[CHRISTINA AGUILERA, "BEAUTIFUL"]
- (SINGING) Now and then, I get insecure from all the pain. I'm so ashamed.
I am beautiful no matter what they say. Words can't bring me down.
I am beautiful in every single way. Yes, words can't bring me down. No, no. So don't you bring me down today.
[END PLAYBACK]
MORTON ANN GERNSBACHER: Take, for instance, hearing aids. The Mayo Clinic's website provides potential hearing aid consumers with the following advice, quote, "Perhaps you've thought about getting a hearing aid, but you're worried about how it will look," end quote. The website further explains, quote, "All hearing aids contain the same parts to carry sound from the environment into your ear. However, hearing aids do come in a number of styles which differ in size. Some are small enough to fit inside your ear canal, making them almost invisible," unquote.
And the website further explains, "Generally, the smaller a hearing aid is, the less powerful it is, the shorter its battery life, and the more it will cost. So the upshot is that although the smallest hearing aid is the least powerful, has the shortest battery life, and costs more, hey, it's the least visible, and that's what the Mayo Clinic as well as every other hearing aid website that I've examined assumes that consumers prioritized.
But I think we can do better than that. I think we as a society can agree not to be prejudiced about the visibility of a person's hearing aid. In fact, I know we can given the great strides-- all puns intended-- we've made in overcoming prejudice about the form of prosthetic limbs. For centuries, the overarching goal was to create a prosthetic that most closely resembled a flesh limb. But prosthetics that prioritized the superficial aspects of a flesh limb were bulky, often quite uncomfortable, and not very functional.
These days, we prize function over form. And some prosthetic wearers, like Dan Horkey, who runs a business creating prosthetic tattoo art, want their prosthetics to be noticed. After avoiding showing his prosthetic for two decades, decorating it was a way to become proud of it. Horkey said quote, "It was instant. It just made me feel good. When I walked around in public, people wouldn't look away and avoid eye contact. Instead, it would provoke compliments. I was proud of my leg for the very first time."
And Kira Roche, who wears a floral leg sculpted by hand because, quote, "It's personal. It's a fashion statement," which brings me to clothing tags and shoelaces. As for clothing tags, for years, persons with enhanced tactile sensitivity, what diagnosticians call sensory defensiveness, have told garment producers that clothing tags are annoying. And for such persons-- and I am one of them-- their only recourse is to perform meticulous apparel surgery, being careful to remove each offending tag without creating a hole in the garment.
But a few years ago, clothing manufacturers finally listened to this minority of consumers. And guess what they learned. Like curb cuts and captions, it's not just a minority of weirdos like me who benefit from this accommodation. It's a lot of people.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- So, dude, what is this you're listening to? You need to pump up some jams. I mean, come on. It's Friday, and people want to dance.
Aw, yeah. Phil knows what I'm talking about, don't you, Phil? Let's break out the glow sticks. It's time to get this party started.
N-tss, n-tss. Woop, woop. Wow, MJ in the housey house.
[WHIRRING]
- Thanks, man.
- Sure.
- New Hanes Tagless Underwear. Go tagless.
[END PLAYBACK]
MORTON ANN GERNSBACHER: And as for shoelaces, there are many disabilities, and conditions, and general aging that make tying shoes difficult or even impossible. But most of us who hang out on college campuses have noticed that a lot of people don't tie their shoes these days, including people who are under the paparazzi's constant watch.
And anyone who travels on planes knows that non-tying shoes are very adaptive because they're the fastest way to go through airport security, as George Clooney explained in the movie, Up in the Air.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Follow me. Never get behind old people. Their bodies are littered with hidden metal, and they never seem to appreciate how little time they have left. Asians-- they pack light, travel efficiently, and they've got a thing for slip-on shoes, god love them.
- That's racist.
- I'm like my mother. I stereotype. It's faster.
[END PLAYBACK]
MORTON ANN GERNSBACHER: Lastly, let me turn to discuss one more accommodation that's quite familiar to those of you who teach. As Chair of the University of Wisconsin's Committee on Access and Accommodation in Instruction, I've received a lot of boots-on-the-ground experience with regard to accommodating diverse brains. And the most frequently requested accommodation made by students on today's US college campuses-- it's not curb cuts, it's not sign language, and it's not Braille. Rather it is-- some of you might know-- extended time on in-class exams and tests, what's often called time and a half.
But the terms "extended time" and "time and a half" are actually misnomers because when students request extended time or time and a half, what they really want is to take the quiz or exam without the pressure of being timed. And from everything we know about the psychometrics of testing, these students are barking up the right tree. Psychometrically, we can define quite grossly tests into those that are speeded tests, which, as the name implies, test how rapidly an examinee can complete a set of items, and power tests, which are designed to measure the examinee's skill or knowledge regardless of his or her speed or performance.
For speeded tests, speed of completion is what matters. And therefore, speeded tests in the psychometric version, they often include pretty easy or uniform items so that every examinee knows the answers, but the test contains more items than every examinee can complete. And so the measure, the dependent variable, is how many items are completed.
In contrast, power tests have no time limit whatsoever. Power tests allow as much time as needed. Think about the Raven Progressive Matrices as an example. Every examinee can attempt to answer every item if he or she wants. And the items on power tests are varied by difficulty, and so performance is based not on how rapidly they finish or even when time's up how many items they have completed, but just how many items they can complete given all the time in the world.
Power tests are what most of us assume we are administering when we give in-class exams. What we care about is how well the students have learned and mastered the material and how skillfully they can apply what they've learned. But if an in-class exam has a stop time, it is, by definition, timed. And when students request extended time or time and a half, what they're really requesting is to not feel the pressure of the time ticking off, not to experience anxiety about running out of time, not to have a power test administered as a speeded test.
And as it turns out, just like curb cuts, and captions, and tagless clothes, power tests-- that is tests without time limits-- aid everyone. There are numerous studies across all age ranges that indicate removing time limits from a power test increases the test validity and reliability as well as decreasing students' anxiety. So for instance, some of you might know that the 10th version of the Stanford Achievement Test for grades 1 through 12 no longer has a time limit for any of the tests. And the decision was based on data from nearly a half-million students.
Therefore, if you use in-class exams and you too want to measure power rather than speed, I give you two suggestions. And these are the same suggestions I give my colleagues at the University of Wisconsin. One is allow all students to remain as long as they want to finish the exam.
And tell them in advance, there's no pressure. You can stay here as long as you want. You can stay here till 10 o'clock at night.
It's fine. There is no pressure. You don't have to feel the anxiety of time ticking away.
But if that's not feasible because I've seen a lot of space in this University. I think it's feasible. Wisconsin, we're shoehorned in. But if that's not feasible because of space limitations or maybe the TA would like to get home before midnight, then design exams that last no longer than two thirds of the class period, and tell your students that.
Tell your students that your exam is designed to only last two thirds of the period, that you expect everyone will be finished by two thirds. But if they want to stay the additional third, they can because the test is designed only for the first two thirds of the period. And if you do that, what you will be doing is accommodating all students, those with and without disabilities, decreasing anxiety, and-- the added bonus-- you'll increase the validity and the reliability of your exams because power tests, when they're administered as speeded tests, lose a lot of their validity and reliability.
Students, use that extra time. If the instructor says, you have all the time in the world, or the instructor says, the test is only going to last for two thirds of the class period, you have another third that you can do with whatever you want, use that time to review your answers and change them if you aren't sure because one of the biggest myths about college-based test taking is that you shouldn't change your answers. You should go with the first impression. But every research study in the literature shows that the majority of changes on tests are from wrong to right rather than right to wrong.
So speaking of review, let me quickly review what I've presented today. I began by discussing when we as scientists should accentuate putative brain differences and when we shouldn't. And we know that the public loves brains. And for centuries, we've loved measuring brain structure and function.
But while some brain differences, such as the difference in cortical thickness between men and women, are now simply viewed as diversity, other differences, such as the difference in cortical thickness between autistic and non-autistic persons, are still viewed as deficit. Indeed, for some minority group, differences are deemed deficits regardless of the direction of the difference.
The autism imaging literature shows very few consistent patterns, and it's rife with differences always being interpreted as deficits. A lack of consistency also characterizes claims about autism and mirror neurons. And I suggested that more fruitful patterns for investigating brain differences exist-- for example, as demonstrated by studies with congenitally blind people that show that they use their occipital lobes in these amazingly excitingly flexible ways.
And this line of research demonstrates and exemplifies the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which prescribes respect for differences and acceptance of disability, which led me to the second section of my talk in which I discussed why we as individuals should accept the brain differences that truly do exist because the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities tells us disability is part of human diversity and humanity.
I reviewed a bevy of behavioral studies with thousands of participants of all ages of various disabilities in numerous countries that overwhelmingly demonstrate that acceptance of disability is positively associated with positive psychological states. For example, greater acceptance of disability is associated with higher self-esteem. Acceptance of disability is also associated with better psychological wellbeing.
I also reviewed the acceptance of disability is usually independent of severity of disability. And similarly, quality of life for disabled persons is also usually independent of severity of disability. I reviewed that parents of children with disabilities report experiencing stress. However, parents' subjectively reported stress is unrelated to objective measures of their children's severity of disability.
And the same is true for parents of children with the disability of autism. Their subjectively reported stress is unrelated to every objective measure and feature of autism. Indeed, parents' subjectively reported stress is only related to their subjective judgments of their children's abilities and disabilities-- a fact that researchers should take heed of before relying on parent report measures.
I mentioned that parents' acceptance of their children's autism attenuates their stress. And parents' acceptance of their children's autism is unrelated to the severity of their child's disability, and that parents' acceptance of their child's disability is often based on reframing and accommodations, which led me to the last section of my talk in which I discussed how we as a society can accommodate disabilities. I mentioned that accommodation is the key to supporting diversity and disability and that many accommodations, although implemented initially to aid only disabled people, have now been co-opted and are used predominantly by non-disabled people. Captions and curb cuts are two examples.
Captions facilitate learning to read, learning a second language, comprehension, memory for hearing people. Some accommodations, like Braille and sign language, that remain specific to disability, and these disability-specific accommodations are often shrouded in stigma. Example-- hearing aids are often prioritized by their inauspiciousness. But an increasing number of limb prosthetics are a source of pride, personal statement, and even fashion statement. And with regard to fashion, I mentioned that clothing manufacturers have finally gotten the message that clothing tags are annoying.
A lot of people don't tie their shoes. And untimed tests-- that is tests without any time limit-- aid everyone by decreasing anxiety and increasing the test reliability and validity. And, students, when reviewing answers on a test, if you're in doubt, change your answer because chances are, you'll be changing wrong to right.
I'm going to conclude here. But because I mentioned that I'm a parent of a child with a disability-- actually, a teenager 17-year-old with a disability, I actually want the last word to be provided by my teenage son, Drew, who is an award-winning filmmaker and a proud person with a disability. So I'm going to conclude here with one of his two three-minute short videos.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[STREET SOUNDS]
[DOOR CREAKING]
[BACKGROUND CHATTER]
[JAZZ MUSIC]
[BELL RINGING]
- Speed daters, it's time to meet your next date.
- Um. [CLEARS THROAT] Hi.
- Hi.
- Howdy
- Hello.
- Uh.
- You need a chair.
- Huh?
[LAUGHTER]
[BELL RINGING]
- OK, speed daters, it's time to meet your next date.
- Oh, sorry.
- No problem.
- Seriously?
- Hello? Huh?
- [SQUEALING]
[JAZZ MUSIC]
[END PLAYBACK]
MORTON ANN GERNSBACHER: Thank you for your attention today.
[APPLAUSE]
Morton Ann Gernsbacher, the Vilas Research Professor and Sir Frederic Bartlett Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, gave the 2013 Riccuti Lecture Oct. 28, 2013, urging acceptance of putative brain differences as aspects of diversity, rather than deficits.
Gernsbacher is known for her investigation of the cognitive processes that underlie human communication and the communication challenges that often accompany autism.
The annual Ricciuti Lecture is delivered in recognition of the late Professor Emeritus Henry Ricciuti, an internationally renowned scholar recognized for his many contributions to the study of child development through research, instruction, and service.
