A review of joint attention and social-cognitive brain systems in typical development and autism spectrum disorder

This article provides a review of the increasingly detailed imaging literature on the neurodevelopment of joint attention. Many findings from this literature support and inform the hypothesis that the neurodevelopment of joint attention contributes to the functional development of neural systems for human social cognition. Joint attention begins to develop by 5 months of age and is tantamount to the ability to adopt a common perspective with...