Genie (feral Child) - Hospital Stay - Brain Testing

Brain Testing

Beginning in 1971, scientists conducted a series of neurolinguistic tests on Genie. In early March 1971, researchers Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima came from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies to administer their own series of brain exams, making Genie the first language-deprived child to undergo detailed examination of her brain. Doctors already suspected Genie was extremely right-hemisphere dominant, but the tests went even further and showed the asymmetry was at a level of severity which had previously only been documented in patients with either split-brain or who had had their left hemispheres surgically removed. Genie was right-handed and her brain was completely physically intact, but her left hemisphere appeared to have undergone no specialization whatsoever.

In approximately 95% of right-handed people the left ear, which is more strongly connected to the right hemisphere, tends to better process environmental and musical sounds, while the right ear is better at picking up language. This preference is usually very subtle, and the difference between ears is usually very slight; however, despite having regular hearing in both ears, on dichotic listening tests researchers found Genie identified language sounds with 100% accuracy in her left ear while correctly answering at only a chance level when using her right ear. On non-language dichotic listening tests she showed a slight preference for her left ear, which was normal for a right-handed person and helped rule out the possibility that her brain's hemispheres were only reversed in dominance (as is the case in approximately 5% of right-handed people), and her monaural tests were 100% accurate in both ears; this discrepancy was far larger than what is found in most people. This suggested that, despite her early development as a normal right-handed person, the competition between ears was only between her right ear ipsilateral and left ear contralateral pathways. These findings led researchers to conclude that she was processing both environmental and language sounds exclusively in her right hemisphere, which in turn meant that Genie's language acquisition was solely taking place in her right hemisphere. Bellugi and Klima also noted that Genie seemed to understand far more words than she would spontaneously say, but could not tell what cues she used to respond to other peoples' speech. They recommended using tests and games to establish her comprehension, writing that these would more accurately pinpoint her linguistic abilities than relying solely on her spontaneous speech, and emphasized that any non-language cues such as tone of voice and facial expressions would have to be eliminated to yield the best possible results.

Subsequent sets of brain exams conducted at the Brain Research Institute at UCLA, under the direction of Curtiss, Victoria Fromkin, and Stephen Krashen—then also one of Fromkin's graduate students—largely confirmed Bellugi and Klima's original findings. In addition to the listening tests, which were administered throughout 1972 and 1973, researchers gave Genie tachistoscopic and evoked response tests. These showed she performed most tasks primarily using her right hemisphere, such as perspective, holistic recall of unrelated objects, gestalt perception, and number perception, at a much higher level than those typically performed by the left hemisphere, such as tests on sequential order. Her improvement on right hemisphere functions was also extraordinarily rapid, and far outstripped her ability to learn left hemisphere tasks. For instance, in January 1972, about a year and three months after being rescued, her scores on Raven's Progressive Matrices were measured the 50th percentile for an 8.5–9 year old. Some abilities, such as her spatial awareness, were at or higher than the level of a typical adult, indicating that her brain had lateralized and that her right hemisphere had undergone specialization; on spatial awareness tests, her scores were reportedly the highest ever recorded to that point. Scientists believed that Genie had been developing as a normal right-handed person until the time her father began isolating her, and the imbalance between Genie's left and right hemispheres was because the sensory stimulation Genie had as a child was almost exclusively visual and tactile. These functions are predominantly controlled in the right hemisphere, which led the scientists to believe that because Genie had no linguistic input to stimulate lateralization in the left hemisphere, it had never lateralized. The findings from researchers at the Brain Institute on Genie's evoked response tests also lent further support to the researchers' belief that Genie was using her right hemisphere for language.

There were a few primarily right hemisphere tasks she did not perform well on; she was noted to have difficulty with certain facial recognition tests and certain tests on remembering designs. Curtiss' explanation was that these tasks normally require the use of both hemispheres, which would be very difficult for Genie since she almost exclusively used her already-specialized right hemisphere. However she was later noted to have done markedly better on facial recognition tests. In addition to Curtiss' 1975 reference to anecdotal instances where Genie had managed to recognize someone, on a Mooney Face Test Genie was asked to identify the real faces out of a set of 70, of which 50 were real and 20 were false; she got all of the real faces and only missed 6 of the false ones, which was far higher than the level of a typical adult. Curtiss also remembered one instance when she and Fromkin attempted to test Genie's memory for design, using a group of sticks to form a shape and having Genie replicate it from memory; although the sticks were of different colors, Curtiss said that for purposes of the test they only cared about her ability to copy the structure. Curtiss was surprised when Genie not only reconstructed the design, but exactly copied the colors of the sticks from the original as well.