Interrelations among social-cognitive skills in young children with autism.
Preschoolers with autism stumble most on joint-attention tasks, so probe and build that skill first.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Malinda and colleagues watched preschoolers with autism play short games. They compared how the kids did on joint-attention tasks versus simple behavior tasks.
The team wanted to map each child’s social-cognitive profile. No treatment was given; they just described what they saw.
What they found
Joint-attention tasks were the hardest for the autistic preschoolers. The same kids could follow basic instructions or move objects just fine.
In other words, trouble sharing attention, not trouble moving, marked the group.
How this fits with other research
Gabriels et al. (2001) saw the same split one year earlier. They also found that weak joint attention and empathy predicted poor peer play in verbally able children with autism.
Brigham et al. (2010) added a parent angle. When moms used keeping-cue combos, their autistic preschoolers looked longer at toys. This gives you a free-play tactic that can warm up the very skill Malinda flagged as shaky.
McGonigle et al. (2014) extended the idea with eye-tracking. Faces lost the competition when circumscribed-interest objects were on screen. This helps explain why joint-attention tasks feel hard: strong objects pull gaze away.
Gong et al. (2023) pushed the timeline forward. They showed that social working memory stays flat in autistic preschoolers, matching the slow growth Malinda described for attention skills.
Why it matters
Before you teach social rules, test joint attention. If the child can’t shift eye contact between you and a toy, back up and use parent keeping cues or reduce high-interest objects in the field. Once shared attention is solid, social-cognitive drills move faster.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →During free play, combine three parent cues—point, name, smile—before placing a toy within reach and watch if the child follows your gaze.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Typically developing infants show a reliable developmental sequence of emergence of early social-cognitive skills, such as joint attention, communicative gestures, gaze and point following, imitation, and referential language. First infants share others' attention, then they follow others' attention and then behavior, and then they direct others' attention and then behavior. The current study used a series of tests from a study of typically developing infants (Carpenter, Nagell, & Tomasello, 1998) to investigate interrelations among these social-cognitive skills in young children with autism and children with other developmental delays. Tests of object permanence, spatial relations, facial and manual imitation, and executive function also were included. We found that for most children with autism, unlike other children, tests involving others' attention were more difficult than tests involving others' behavior. However, within the domains of attention and behavior, the typical pattern of sharing, then following, and then directing was evident. There were several positive intercorrelations among the social-cognitive skills (as there were for typically developing infants), but there also was some evidence of individual differences in patterns. Implications for theories of social-cognitive and language development are discussed.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2002 · doi:10.1023/a:1014836521114