Neurons Mirror The Attention Of Others

[wolfhnd]

I ran across an interesting article today that discusses our innate propensity for following someone else's gaze. I found it interesting and it made me wonder what effect this might have on blind people and their relationships.

"We speculate that the neurons' activity may lie beneath critical social behavior, such as joint attention," said Michael Platt, Ph.D., Duke professor of neurobiology and evolutionary anthropology and senior author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "If social inputs to the neurons are disrupted, that might contribute to the social deficits seen in autism and other disorders."

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 172451.htm

Do the blind have difficulty with joint attention?

[Paralith]

Visual joint attention, of course, but I'm sure that their attention can be brought to a specific subject by the cues from another person, like vocal cues. Autistics have trouble picking up social cues, in particular understanding what another person is interested in or wants unless that person says it directly. For example they don't really get sarcasm, because they don't understand that the tone of the voice indicates the person actually means the opposite of what they're saying. A blind person who is otherwise normal in social cognition would be able to do that just fine.