Humans are the only species known to use symbolic gestures for communication. This affords a unique medium for nonverbal emotional communication with a distinct theoretical status compared to facial expressions and other biologically evolved nonverbal emotion signals. While a frown is a frown all around the world, the relation of emotional gestures to their referents is arbitrary and varies fro...

Joint attention occurs when two (or more) individuals attend together to some object. It has been identified by psychologists as an early form of our joint engagement, and is thought provide us with understanding other minds that basic in sophisticated conceptual resources are not involved. Accordingly, it also attracted the interest philosophers. Moreover, a very recent trend psychological phi...

The early emerging capacity for Joint Attention (JA), or socially coordinated visual attention, is thought to be integral to the development of social-cognition in childhood. Recent studies have also begun to suggest that JA affects adult cognition as well, but methodological limitations hamper research on this topic. To address this issue we developed a novel virtual reality paradigm that inte...

We compared responding to joint attention (RJA) in younger siblings of children with ASD (SIBS-ASD; n = 46) and younger siblings of children developing typically (SIBS-TD; n = 35). Children were tested between 12 and 23 months of age in a situation in which an experimenter directed the child's attention to one of 8 targets. Each child responded to 10 different combinations of verbal and nonverb...