Joint Attention

Joint Attention is Sharing:

• Attention--when two or more people are paying attention to the same thing.

• Emotions--when two or more people share an emotional state.

• Intentions--when two or more people are trying to accomplish the same thing and they know they are doing it together.

Joint Attention Skills Include:

• being able to look at another person's eyes and face in order to get information like how that person feels, what that person is looking at, what that person is trying to do.

• being able to follow another person's eye-gaze to then look at the same thing. Click here for a diagram.

• being able to sustain joint attention, which is harder in an activity where you cannot predict what the other person will be doing, feeling or planning. Certain social situations require that one shift attention frequently to monitor the other person. Social play typically helps children learn to shift attention back and forth rapidly but for children with autism, the social play is often too confusing and the child stops playing. The child with autism then has less opportunities to learn how to shift attention.

• being able to regulate (manage) emotions in a social situations. The reason that this skill is important is because a child will not engaged in joint attention activities where emotional states are shared if sharing another person's anticipation, excitement, worry, fear, annoyance, anger, contentment, joy or sorrow is overwhelming. This is the situation for many children with autism. These children don't know how to manage emotions and will often avoid being with others in order to avoid feeling these emotions with another person. Play helps children learn how to manage emotions (in fact, play does this better than any other activity) but for a child with autism, the play needs to be enough of a challenge, emotionally, that children can learn new coping skills but not too much of a challenge or the child will become overwhelmed. I discuss ways to create games that have enough of the negative emotions to engage a child with autism, but not too much and I call this kind of play, SAFE EMERGENCIES.

• being able to use the imagination system to guess what another person might be thinking or feeling or planning (given all the clues provided by monitoring eye gaze, facial expressions, gestures, language and so on). Also being able to use the imagination to cope with

• being able to comprehend language and non-verbal communication signals well enough to understand what the other person is doing, feeling and intending. Social play is one of nature's systems for learning language skills and non-verbal signals like nodding, shrugging, reaching for a thing, grimacing--but these communication signals may be too complex or occur too rapidly for a child with autism and then the child missed the learning opportunity of social play.

So, just to be explicit here, Joint Attention skills are believed to be important to the development of social skills of all kinds, including the ability to participate in social play. Social play is a highly effective way for children to develop increasingly sophisticated Joint Attention skills. If we are playing with a child for the purpose of helping that child learn Joint Attention skills, the target skills are things like shifting attention, looking at things together, sharing emotions, doing things together, imagining what the other person is thinking about, imagining and pretending in ways that help with emotional regulation. Social play is not the only way your child can learn these skills, but it is hard to find a more pleasurable or effective way to learn these skills. In order for a child with autism to learn through social play, it is often necessary to modify some aspects of that play.