Abstract

Children with Autism display deficits at Joint Attention, they are struggling to coordinate their attention with others and to adopt a common point reference with other people. Moreover, joint attention is also fundamental to our sense of social relatedness and intersubjectivity when it is accompanied by the perception of sharing meaning and experience with another person (Mundy, 1995). The difficulties of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) children with joint attention include less initiation (Charman, 2003; Dawson et al., 2004; Sigman & Ruskin, 1999), and less responsiveness to emotional experience with others (Kasari et al., 1990; Osterling, Dawson &Munson, 2002; Zwaigenbaum, Bryson, Roberts, Brian & Szatmari, 2005). Joint attention plays a significant role in child’s development, specifically by impacting social skills. Social skills include all the social norms and unwritten rules of behavior that are considered acceptable; these are required to generate positive social interactions (Gresham & Elliott, 1984). The social deficit in ASD is at initiation and responsiveness to social interaction (Laushy et al., 2009; Anagnostou et al., 2014).

Previous studies found association between social skills and joint attention at both typical children and autistic children (Delinicolas & Young, 2007; Schietecatte, Roeyers & Warreyn, 2012). However, these studies lack adequate evaluation methods, specifically in the way social skills were graded; some of these studies (Vaughan Van Hecke et al., 2007) the evaluation was performed by self-report questionnaire that was filled by the child’s mother without any validation by observation. Additionally, some of these studies aimed to score social skills based on mother-child interaction, and did not involve peer group (Kasari, Freeman & Paparella, 2006); These methodological ways hamper the ability to conclude about social skills interactions with individuals at the same age level.

The main purpose of this study was to test the association between joint attention and social skills with the peer group in children with autism. The practical significant to this study is derived from the fact that children with autism, as well as all children, require social interactions with individuals at equal age level to develop their self-image and perception. The main hypothesis was that the greater joint attention behavior is associated with better social skills of ASD children and vice versa. The level of the cognitive function of the children taken in consideration, because of the moderating role that can affect the association described above. In addition, this research tried to distinguish between initiation and responsiveness to joint attention and test the association of each with specific social skills.

This study included 50 participants at the age 2-5 with ASD and was conducted at The Child Development Laboratory in Haifa University. During the sessions, the participants were diagnosed using the following tools: The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS; Lord et al., 2000), The Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ; Rutter, et al., 2003), The Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABSII; Sparrow, et al., 2005), Wechsler Preschool and Primary Scale of Intelligence- Third Edition (WPPSI- III HEB; Wechsler, 2002) or the Mullen Scales of Early Learning (MSEL; Mullen, 1995 ). The joint attention was assessed using the Early Social Communication Scales (ESCS; Mundy et al., 2003). In addition, the social skills were evaluated at the children's pre-school using The Social Skills Q-sort (SSQ; Locke, Kretzmann, & Kasari, 2008).

As hypothesized, greater joint attention behavior was associated with better social skills. Additionally, children with higher level of cognitive function showed more joint attention behavior and better social skills. Furthermore, even when the cognitive function level was acknowledged, the association between high initiative and responsiveness to joint attention and between social skills remained strong. The third explorative hypothesis wasn’t fully supported, and the research didn’t find distinctive differences between initiation and response to joint attention.

The findings of the current study deepens the understanding about the association between joint attention and social skills in children with ASD even while taking cognitive function level into consideration. Nevertheless, this findings emphasis the importance of additional studies to distinguish between indices of joint attention, and the need to expand the knowledge about the essence of joint attention and social skills association. The practical purpose of this study is for interventions for ASD children or for children who are at risk to ASD.