The development of the capacity for social attention coordination, or "joint attention," is a major milestone of infancy. Data from a recent study of handicapped infants have raised the hypothesis that the tendency to initiate bids for joint attention may reflect processes associated with the frontal cortex to a greater extent than other forms of infant attention coordination (R. Caplan et al.,...

This paper presents a constructive model by which a robot acquires the ability of joint attention with a human caregiver based on its embedded mechanisms of visual attention and learning with self-evaluation. The former is to look at a salient object in the robot’s view, and the latter is to learn sensorimotor co-ordination when visual attention has succeeded. Since the success of visual attent...

This study investigated social attention impairments in autism (social orienting, joint attention, and attention to another's distress) and their relations to language ability. Three- to four-year-old children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 72), 3- to 4-year-old developmentally delayed children (n = 34), and 12- to 46-month-old typically developing children (n = 39), matched on mental ...

Vision plays a fundamental role in the acquisition of skills such as language, interpreting facial expressions, and skills requiring hand–eye coordination. If a child continues to have an uncorrected distance visual deficit beyond the age of 10–12 years, the plasticity of the visual system is lost and the recovery of vision can be limited.[1] Without sufficient vision, children are limited in e...

Joint attention has been extensively studied in the developmental literature because of overwhelming evidence that the ability to socially coordinate visual attention to an object is essential to healthy developmental outcomes, including language learning. The goal of this study was to understand the complex system of sensory-motor behaviors that may underlie the establishment of joint attentio...

This article provides a review of the increasingly detailed imaging literature on the neurodevelopment of joint attention. Many findings from this literature support and inform the hypothesis that the neurodevelopment of joint attention contributes to the functional development of neural systems for human social cognition. Joint attention begins to develop by 5 months of age and is tantamount t...

Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit deficits in joint attention behaviors. As joint attention is considered a pivotal skill, it has been recommended that intervention programs target the development of joint attention, but there remains a lack of comparative research on the efficacy and effectiveness these intervention programs. Informal observational measures have been acknowl...

Joint attention has been identified as a foundational skill in human-human interaction. If virtual humans are to engage in joint attention, they have to meet the expectations of their human interaction partner and provide interactional signals in a natural way. This requires operational models of joint attention with precise information on natural gaze timing. We substantiate our model of the j...