Eye Contact, Joint Attention, and Autism: Session 238 with Francesca Degli Espinosa

What exactly is Joint Attention? How does Joint Attention interact with Eye Contact? What does the literature say about these repertoires, and how does that coincide with self-reports of the aversive nature of eye contact from Autistic people? 

These have been a few of the questions rolling around in my head for some time. A few years ago, we briefly touched on this subject with my guest today, Dr. Francesca Degli Espinosa, but it was in the backdrop of a larger panel discussion at the 2022 Verbal Behavior Conference. 

Fast forward to 2023, I recently heard Francesca on Dr. Mary Barbera's show talk about Joint Attention in great detail, so I asked her to join me to extend the conversation. 

In this show, we cover:

• What people mean when they use the term Joint Attention
• How JA typically develops in infancy and beyond
• Why 'attention' may not be an especially helpful term
• Some of the neuroscience and eye tracking studies that have examined the development of eye contact in typically developing and Autistic populations
• How to increase the value of looking at peoples' faces
• Why eye contact should be thought of as a reinforcing consequence 
• Some strategies to foster JA in the context of learner assent
• The difficulty of integrating the findings of different literatures that publish research in the area of Autism
• What she's talking about at this year's Stone Soup Conference (spoiler alert: She's going to go deep into this topic, and remember, save on your registration by using the promo code PODCAST)
• The problem associated with teaching eye contact via the 'look at me' method

Here are some of the links to the many resources we discussed:

• 2022 Verbal Behavior Conference Panel Discussion 
• Francesca on Mary Barbera's podcast 
• Francesca's available online courses 
• Dube et al. (2004). Toward a Behavioral Analysis of Joint Attention
• Silva and Fiske (2020). Evaluating the Effects of Establishing Eye Contact on the Skill Acquisition of Individuals with Autism
• Nuske et al. (2015). No Evidence of Emotional Dysregulation or Aversion to Mutual Gaze in Preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Eye-Tracking Pupillometry Study
• Clin and Kissine (2023). Neurotypical, but not autistic, adults might experience distress when looking at someone avoiding eye contact: A live face-to-face paradigm
• A sample of the many eye tracking studies conducted by Dr. Ami Klin and colleagues

This podcast is brought to you by:

The Stone Soup Conference, which is taking place on October 20th. Use code PODCAST to save on your registration as well.

The University of Cincinnati Online. UC Online designed a Master of Education in Behavior Analysis program that is 100% online and asynchronous, meaning you log on when it works for you. Want to learn more? Go to online.uc.edu and click the “request info” button.

Behavior University. Their mission is to provide university quality professional development for the busy Behavior Analyst. Learn about their CEU offerings, including their brand new 8-hour Supervision Course, as well as their RBT offerings over at behavioruniversity.com/observations.