Joint attention

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Okay, in concrete terms: what IS joint attention? Does anyone can explain it? Or at least explain parts of it?

I can't identify what joint attention is and why it's special or when it happens in real life.

In order to get reassessed, I got out my old diagnostic report and noticed that it says that my "joint attention" is severely/noticeably limited/restricted (=direct translation). I'm not sure how my joint attention is today considering I don't really understand what it is.

Got this from a website:

Question: What Is Lack of Joint Attention in Autism?
If you have a child with autism, you may have heard therapists tell you that your child needs to work on something called "joint attention." What is joint attention, and why is it important?

Answer: When you and your child are reading a book together, you are paying "joint attention" to the pictures. When you are reading the book and your child is playing with his fingers, wandering around the room or noticing a bird flying by the window, you may be reading to your child, but your child is not engaging with you. It can be very tough to develop joint attention skills in a child with autism, but of course the ability to attend to a conversation or activity along with another person is absolutely critical.
Why is it often hard for kids with autism to build joint attention skills?

Unlike typically developing children (or even children with related disorders such as ADHD), children with autism are often more interested in and engaged by their own thoughts and sensations than by other people or even the outside world. As is implied in the word "aut"ism (meaning "self-ism"), people on the spectrum tend to focus inward rather than outward. While that's not necessarily a problem some of the time, it can limit children's ability to learn through imitation, develop play and social skills, and attend in a learning situation such as a classroom.

An eggsample of joint attention is when someone points at something for you look at, and you look at the thing. If you don't have joint attention, then you might look at their arm, hand, and finger that moved instead of the thing.

Another eggsample is when someone is looking in a certain direction, and you follow their gaze. If you look at their pimples on their face instead, then you don't have joint attention.

Another eggsample is when you and someone are looking at something together, and you and someone alternate your gazes between the thing and each other, looking at the thing together, but also looking at each other eberry once in awhile.

When an autistic child appears to be doing something else when someone is reading to them, that may mean that they are not paying attention, but not necessarily. In many cases, autistic children are paying full attention when they look like they are paying no attention. They may be listening to the reading, and they may be looking at the pictures out of the corner of their eye. They may glance at the picture in the book, take a mental photograph of the page, and look at the photograph in their mind instead of continuing to look at the picture in the book.

Joint attention is basically an NT social behavior through which NTs keep cueing other NTs that they are focused on and engaging with each other

To many autistic adults, joint attention continues to be unnatural and irrelevant. I still look at people's fingers when they point at something for me to look at.

Very interesting explanation, btbnnyr!! !

I guess another example is that almost no one on the spectrum looks people in the eye when conversing, but are actually 100% focused on that conversation?
Because avoiding the others eyes literary makes it at least 10-30% easier to focus on their voice.
When I have to look someone in the eye a lot I get too anxious to answer with what's really on my mind!! !!