Joint AttentionWe would like to be able to recognize Asperger Syndrome in young children so an early diagnosis can rule out bad parenting, deliberately wrong teaching strategies and alert people to the special needs of these children. Intervention can start and help can be found. Looking at the way normal children grow and mature, it is obvious that their development follows a certain pattern and goes through stages. For normally developing children these patterns and stages are practically similar. For children with Asperger this is not the case. Infants from 9 months communicate and learn new information by following the gaze of others and by using their own eye contact and gestures to show or direct the attention of the people around them. Scientists refer to this skill as “joint attention.”
Joint attention is a necessary skill for cognitive skills such as social referencing, language acquisition and learning through modeling behaviors of others around you. Without the ability of joint attention children would not be able to learn how to speak or get their parents attention when they want something.
Social skillJoint attention is a vital skill to social competence at all ages: Children and adults that are unable to follow engage and react to joint attention may forever be impaired in their capacity for relatedness and relationships. In fact, clinical research indicates that Asperger is characterized by chronic, pronounced impairments in initiating joint attention. In other words, children with Asperger Syndrome or other autism spectrum disorders, show a lack of spontaneous sharing experiences with others. Joint attention is a vital skill which will affect the development of social skills and social interaction with people around you.The concept of joint attention is a bit more complicated than just following others’ gaze; it requires the integration of several networks in the brain. It involves paying attention to the external world and the actions of people and at the same time paying attention to our self. Two areas of the human brain interact so we can simultaneously keep track of the direction of our self and other’s attention.
ResearchResearch indicates that joint attention is important for the development of other, later-emerging, skills, such as more complex expressive language, symbolic play, and theory of mind . Impairments in the development of joint attention skills are a hallmark of children with autism spectrum disorders such as Asperger Syndrome. While children with Asperger do not differ from typically-developing children in the amount of requesting behaviors, they exhibit far fewer joint attention behaviors (Mundy et al. 1994; Mundy et al. 1996). Other studies have also found that while children with autism consistently used gestural communication to request objects or actions, they rarely attempted to direct adults' attention through the use of gestures (Wetherby & Prizant, 1984). Kasari, Sigman, Mundy, and Yirmiya (1990) have further noted that, even when joint attention is shown, children with autism are much less likely than either typically developing or other developmentally delayed children to display positive affect along with joint attention behaviors.Can you improve or encourage joint attention?Research shows that children with Asperger who display more intact joint attention skills exhibit better outcomes with respect to the development of cognitive, language, and symbolic play skills. Joint attention has a vital role in the development of children with Asperger. You can help your child by imitating his or her behavior, or use a variety of instructional techniques (e.g., ABA, pivotal response training, incidental learning, “floor time,” etc.) which may have some effect for increasing joint attention behaviors in children with Asperger.Back to Asperger-Advice Children Back to Asperger-Advice Homepage
|
