O papel do contato com o olhar para o compartilhamento da atenção em casos de crianças com transtorno do espectro autista

Abstract

The present research aimed to investigate the mutual gazing role in situations of joint attention in cases of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). We start from assumptions of Cultural Psychology in which human development is revealed in the history of each person's interactions with the world, which are mediated by language. With this perspective, we invested in an alternative to the predominance of studies dedicated to the identification of neurobehavioral aspects in communication in cases of ASD. We justify the relevance of this alternative based on the complexity of psychological processes, which cannot be treated only as processes of a neurological nature. We recognize in this study the discussions about communication that deal with the broad active interdependence between speaker, listener and meaning. This interdependence is neglected in more traditional explanations, which simulate human communication in computer programs. The participants of the present research were two children diagnosed with ASD, who do not use speech and their therapist. This was a longitudinal study of two cases. The empirical material analyzed consisted of 19 videos with an average duration of 30 minutes. These videos consisted of recordings of participants involved in therapeutic activities. From a microgenetic analysis of the interaction that was videotaped records, we captured six frames, through which we discussed the mutual gazing role in the joint attention. In the results, we highlight that mutual gazing was part of a minimal sequence of actions and responses that anchored a wide variability of responsiveness situations. This variability gave visibility to the agentivity by children with ASD who do not use speech in communicative situations. We observed that the alignment between the therapist's actions and the children's responses, or vice versa, was preserved in the variability of responsiveness. In this way, we point to the child's attention for environment. We conclude that this attention was driven by interests and it was exercised within the scope of communicative processes, so that it was, necessarily a situation of sharing meanings. We also emphasize that the expression of the children's and the therapist's particularities in responsiveness was reflected as a reason for the variations and were related to the history of the child's relationship with the object/event that was involved in the communicative situation. The expression of particularities in responsiveness confirmed, then, the level of intersubjectivity in communicative process.