Joint Attention and Its Relationship with Autism Risk Markers at 18 Months of Age

(1) Joint attention is the ability to coordinate attention to share a point of reference with another person. It has an early onset and is a clear indicator of understanding the representations of others, and it is essential in the development of symbolic thought and the acquisition of language. Deficiencies in this prelinguistic early communication skill are strong markers of the risk of autism spectrum disorder (ASD); (2) this longitudinal study aimed to evaluate joint attention skills in a group of 32 infants at two developmental moments (8 and 12 months) in order to explore whether their performance on this skill was related to the presence of early signs of ASD at 18 months. Logistic m…