What are the types of joint attention and how is it related to brain function, autism and developmental stages?

What is joint attention?

Humans are various odd characteristics, one of which is reading others’ thoughts.

By this, I mean the ability to look at another’s line of sight and motions and identify what they are thinking about or what they want. So, what functions is this psychological ability founded upon?

The field of psychology has the concept of joint attention.

It may be easy to visualize if you imagine a baby and an adult reading a picture book together—the concept refers to two or more people directing their sight and attention to the same thing.

For joint attention to exist, a person must firstly recognize where the other person is looking. This ability generally appears at about 9 months of age.

However, what mechanisms of brain functions does joint attention operate by?

The paper I discuss today describes the relationship between joint attention and development of the brain and autism.

Joint attention and the brain’s attention system

According to this paper, joint attention can be broken down into two types.

One is responding to joint attention, which is the ability to notice where another is looking.

The other is initiating joint attention, which encourages another to look at something and commence joint attention by gestures such as pointing.

Different attention systems in the brain are involved in each of these. As shown in the diagram below, responding to joint attention is related to the posterior attention system, which involves noticing (bottom-up attention), while initiating joint attention is related to the anterior attention system, which involves searching (active attention). The development of joint attention needs to wait for the development of these two attention systems in the brain.

How is joint attention linked to the development of sociality?

Patients with autism often have difficulty with sociality, and delayed development of joint attention has been demonstrated by a range of studies.

But how is joint attention linked to social capabilities?

This paper suggests that firstly attention to others appears, then as applications of that, attention to the self and joint attention develop, and based on joint attention, social cognition that allows understanding of social situations and on top of this, understanding of symbols and language progresses (from the shared attention with others), and ultimately flexible and appropriate social communicating develop.

In other words, social communication grows gradually like a spiral, beginning with noticing others and oneself and joint attention.

However, there have been cases of patients with autism who have remarkable linguistic functions, so I wonder how this model would explain this phenomenon.

Reference URL: A Parallel and Distributed Processing Model of Joint Attention, Social-Cognition and Autism