Joint attention and maternal attention across varying dyadic interactions for autistic children

Abstract

Background

Joint attention (JA) is an area of delay associated with autism. Individual differences in JA are shown to relate to language development. The present study examined JA initiations (IJA) and responses to JA (RJA) of autistic children in structured and unstructured contexts with their mothers to examine the relation between mother attention and JA.

Method

Forty-two autistic children (ages 2.5 to 5.5 years) and their mothers engaged in 15 m interactions in three social contexts (competing demands, teaching, free play). Children were categorized by language level into limited language (N = 20) and verbal (N = 21) groups based on ADOS-2 module to assess group and contextual differences. Contingency analyses assessed bi-directional temporal relations between observed child JA and mother attention in lagged intervals.

Results

Rate of children’s IJA and maternal attention differed depending on the context of their interaction. Child IJA and mother attention showed a bi-directional temporally contingent association such that child IJA predicted subsequent maternal attention, and maternal attention predicted subsequent child IJA. RJA was unrelated to maternal attention in contingency analyses. Post-hoc analyses indicated a language level group by receptive communication, and group by expressive communication interaction on the contingency between child IJA and subsequent mother attention such that a stronger contingency emerged for dyads wherein children had limited language.

Conclusions

The present study illustrates the important role that children’s social communication behaviors may have within mother-child social interactions, and how children’s verbal ability, as well as the context of the social interaction may influence bi-directional social attention.