Joint Attention
Joint attention is the shared focus of two individuals on an object. It refers to a cluster of behaviors in one of two classes: a child's response to someone else pointing or shifting eye gaze, and a child seeking another's attention. Many joint-attention behaviors differ in children with autism: for example, eye contact is relatively absent or atypical. These joint attention skills seem to be prerequisites for functional language development. It has also been hypothesized that autistic children initiate joint attention perhaps even as often as their neurotypical peers, albeit in atypical ways, and that a parent should join an autistic child's focus of attention and try harder to notice the child's atypical requests for attention rather than insist on typical behavior from the child. The empirical data supporting the latter hypothesis has been questioned.
Read more about this topic: Controversies In Autism
Famous quotes containing the words joint and/or attention:
“There is no such thing as “the Queen’s English.” The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Great speeches have always had great soundbites. The problem now is that the young technicians who put together speeches are paying attention only to the soundbite, not to the text as a whole, not realizing that all great soundbites happen by accident, which is to say, all great soundbites are yielded up inevitably, as part of the natural expression of the text. They are part of the tapestry, they aren’t a little flower somebody sewed on.”
—Peggy Noonan (b. 1950)