Linking C2U and Research

The Importance of Curiosity to You (C2U), Your Child’s Guide

I attended the International Meeting for Autism Research (IMFAR) in San Francisco in May. It was a fabulous event with researchers across the globe, 800 presenters and 2300 participants! I was dumbstruck by the sheer amount of research happening in the field of autism today.

At the meeting, there were 2 keynote speakers that particularly took my breath away: Ami Klin and Connie Kasari.

Ami Klin has studied autism for many years and is the head of the Marcus Autism Center, a National Institute of Health Center of Autism Excellence in Atlanta, Georgia. You can read more about him here: http://www.marcus.org/About-Us/Leadership/Get-to-Know-Dr-Klin

Connie Kasari has dedicated her life’s work to researching things near and dear to my heart: joint attention and symbolic play with children with autism. Her research projects can be found on her site: http://www.kasarilab.org/

Both researchers stress the importance of joint attention and it’s impact on development. Ami Klin shared that he was struck by his own research’s findings that lead him to have the existential realization that what we look at drives where we find meaning. More specifically, he found that Infants who later develop autism are fairly scattered in their eye gaze with a bit more falling on inanimate objects. Infants who later develop neuro-typically are clearly gazing at caregiver's’ eyes and mouths. The trajectory of these eye gaze patterns can later be observed to be more scattered visual attention to objects in the environment during social interactions rather than social information. If you then think about the implications of where attention is placed on later cognitive development, autism truly makes more sense, and so does our ability to guide someone to learn the value of gazing toward social reciprocity and engagement for learning and growth.

My drive for people to use C2U in their interactions with people with autism is stronger than ever. Where curiosity goes, attention goes. By simply and clearly allowing someone to shift their attention (which researchers are now calling “sticky attention”) to the more social interactive elements of any scene (you) before the inanimate objects, you are giving them a very powerful  and fundamental tool for learning. By guiding them to sustain their attention there, you are guiding them to learn from it. I call this C2U+Synchrony.

For more information and steps to gain C2U+Synchrony with your child, student, or friend, please see my blog on the subject: http://synergyautism.blogspot.com/2016/05/c2u-plus-synchrony.html