Attention regulation by children with Down syndrome: coordinated joint attention and social referencing looks

We examined attention regulation of children in two different situations designed to elicit triadic interactions (i.e., between self, other, and object). Thirty-five children with Down syndrome and 23 children with typical development were observed in a semi-structured adult-child interaction designed to elicit coordinated joint attention and an ambiguous situation in which a moving robot prompted an emotional response from the adults in order to elicit social referencing looks from the child. Children with Down syndrome engaged in significantly fewer social referencing looks. Group differences were not found for coordinated joint attention looks, suggesting that the difficulty for children with Down syndrome is in cognitive appraisal abilities.