Joint Attention Essay

460 Words2 Pages

In Joint Attention in Children with Autism (2004) describes the definition of joint attention in typically developing children and how we can use strategies in children with autism in order to teach joint attention to young children with autism. Around nine months of age, typically developing children begin to engage in joint attention, an early social communicative behavior in which two people share attentional focus on an object or event ( Bakeman & Adamson, 1984). A deficit in joint attention is one of the first symptoms that we can see in children with autism before one year of age and before of any diagnosis (Baron-Cohen, Allen, & Gillber, 1992; Charman et al., 1998; Osterling & Dawson, 1994). An important point is that according to Charman …show more content…

In this second intervention the protocol will be to teach the child to initiate a comment and respond when the other person comments on the stimuli. Here, we are not going to teach joint attention to children with autism, the goal is to teach them eye contact ant requesting in the form of gaze alternation and pointing in order to build joint attention as social skill in children with autism. This concept is interesting because we can conclude that we need to break our goal in little tasks in order to teach social skills to children with autism. Also, I would like to say that Applied Behavior Analysis is a powerful tool when we are teaching joint attention skills to children with autism because is based in the principles of learning theory and it helps to improve socially significant behaviors to a meaningful degree. I would like to say that we can use ABA to teach children with autism social skills, as joint attention, social initiations, communication skills, play with their peers, and requesting and pointing. Also, important to say that one of the deficits in children with autism is eye contact and ABA could help to teach this social skill to children with autism in order to improve their