Why do children with autism have a joint attention impairment?
Leekam is interested in why it is that impairment in the ability to jointly attend with another to an aspect of the world is able to serve as a robust indicator of autism in children. Her claim is that autistic children have a deficit in the early development of attention, and this is what manifests itself in problems with later joint attention. Specifically, she claims that a relative poverty of gaze following, pointing and showing objects to others in autistic children is due to a basic low-level attentional impairment. In framing her hypothesis, she considers and rejects two other hypotheses that attempt to account for the joint attention deficit in autism. The first of these she dubs the familiar ‘meta-representational account’, which claims the absence of joint attention forms of behavior is the result of a representational deficit in autistic children. Specifically, that they cannot represent another’s inner state of ‘attention’, and so cannot form triadic representations of them
