Joint Attention
Contents
Joint Attention
Basic Characteristics
- Description
Joint Attention refers to the process of alerting one person to a stimulus through nonverbal cues such as finger pointing or gazing. It is one of the first signs of the development of a theory of mind in babies and serves as an important step to later language and social development.
- History
- Joint Attention and Autism Spectrum Disorder
Joint Attention is considered one of the early core deficits in children with ASD. It can be used as a significant predictor of language development in children with autism.
- Tests to Measure Joint Attention
- Intervention
Treatments have been developed to improve Joint Attention in children with a variable amount of success. In two recent studies (Kasari et al., 2006; Kasari et al. 2008), it was found that improvements in child joint attention initiations and joint engagement with mothers were able to significantly predict the child's language abilities a year later. Furthermore, it was found that the treatment was most effective for children who were initially nonverbal (speaking less than five spoken words).
Other potential factors that could affect the successfulness of a treatment could be ethnic and economic conditions. However, research incorporating subjects of various economic and ethnic backgrounds have been few and more needs to be done in order to see if these factors are actual moderators of treatment success.
- References
Related Information
- Joint Attention and Autism Spectrum Disorder
- Intervention
- Tasks or Tests to Measure Joint Attention
- Intervention
- Indicators (dependent variables, conditions, or contrasts; measurement variables used for analysis) associated with this construct (vote or nominate by editing this page):
- Closely related pages (vote or nominate related pages by editing this page):
- CNP Level (What's this?)
- Cognitive Concept
External Resources
- Links out:
- Wikipedia: Joint Attention
- Google: Joint Attention
- PubMed: Joint Attention
- -ucla cognitive atlas- (coming soon!)
- Database links
