Differences in social attention development begin to be apparent in the 6th to 12th month of development in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and theoretically reflect important elements of its neurodevelopmental endophenotype. This paper examines alternative conceptual views of these early social attention symptoms and hypotheses about the mechanisms involved in their development. One model emphasizes mechanism involved in the spontaneous allocation of attention to faces, or social orienting. Alternatively, another model emphasizes mechanisms involved in the coordination of attention with other people, or joint attention, and the socially bi-directional nature of its development. This model raises the possibility that atypical responses of children to the attention or the gaze of a social partner directed toward themselves may be as important in the development of social attention symptoms as differences in the development of social orienting. Another model holds that symptoms of social attention may be important to early development, but may not impact older individuals with ASD. The alterative model is that the social attention symptoms in infancy (social orienting and joint attention), and social cognitive symptoms in childhood and adulthood share common neurodevelopmental substrates. Therefore, differences in early social attention and later social cognition constitute a developmentally continuous axis of symptom presentation in ASD. However, symptoms in older individuals may be best measured with in vivo measures of efficiency of social attention and social cognition in social interactions rather than the accuracy of response on analog tests used in measures with younger children. Finally, a third model suggests that the social attention symptoms may not truly be a symptom of ASD. Rather, they may be best conceptualized as stemming from differences domain general attention and motivation mechanisms. The alternative argued for here that infant social attention symptoms meet all the criteria of a unique dimension of the phenotype of ASD and the bi-directional phenomena involved in social attention cannot be fully explained in terms of domain general aspects of attention development.

No abstract

No abstract

This study examined whether school-aged autistic children without co-occurring intellectual disabilities (autistic WoID ) show similar difficulty on Theory of Mind (ToM) tasks as young autistic WoID children and if these difficulties are related to problems in domain-general aspects of cognition. Eighty-one autistic WoID and 44 neurotypical (NT) children between the ages of 8-16 years participated in this study and were matched on verbal IQ. ToM performance significantly and independently differentiated many, but not all, autistic WoID and NT participants above and beyond the effects of working memory and inferential thinking. However, these cognitive variables did not fully explain difficulties with social cognition in autistic WoID children. These findings have implications for understanding autism, the factors that may impact intervention for social cognition in autism, and the factors that impact the education of autistic children who may struggle in general education classrooms. Keywords Autism spectrum disorder • Social cognition • Theory of mindAutism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder that affects social development in around 1 in every 44 children in the United States. Of these children identified with autism, approximately two-thirds are not affected by cooccurring intellectual disability diagnosis (Maenner et al., 2021). Social symptoms for children with autism without intellectual disability (autism WoID ) remain prominent, and

Preliminary evidence from the Childhood Joint Attention Rating Scale (C-JARS; Mundy et al., 2017) suggests symptoms related to diminished joint attention and the spontaneous sharing of experience with others can be assessed with a parent-report measure in children and adolescents with autism. This study was designed to expand on the previous study by examining the validity of both a Social Symptom (SS) and a Prosocial (PS) scale of the C-JARS in a study of school-aged autistic children (n  = 89) with and without co-occurring intellectual disability (ID), as well as an age matched neurotypical sample (n  = 62). Results indicated that both C-JARS scales were sensitive and specific with respect to identifying the diagnostic status of the children. In addition, the PS scale was sensitive to differences in cognitive abilities (IQ) and sex differences in the autism group. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that joint attention and spontaneous sharing of experience symptoms are not only characteristic of preschool children with autism but may also constitute a developmentally continuous dimension of the social phenotype of autism that can be measured in school-aged children.