Social communication development in a contingent world: insights from autism.

This review looks at how children learn to communicate through back-and-forth interactions with others. Autistic children communicate differently, which means they get different responses from family and friends. These different responses then affect how their communication skills develop over time. The authors suggest this helps explain why autistic children may learn language at different rates.

This review examines how social communication develops through real-time behavioural feedback loops between children and their social partners, with specific focus on autism. The authors propose that autistic individuals experience distinct feedback loops because their social behaviours (gaze, gestures, language) differ from non-autistic people, eliciting different responses from social partners and creating cascading effects on future development. The review covers mechanisms from infancy through adulthood, discussing how changing abilities, social demands, and environmental contexts influence social contingency experiences. The authors suggest these feedback loop differences partially explain broader developmental trends in autism, such as language learning pace.

Results suggest interventions should consider the interactive nature of social communication development, potentially focusing on optimizing feedback loops between autistic individuals and their social partners rather than targeting skills in isolation.

As a review article, findings depend on the quality and scope of included studies. The abstract does not specify methodology for study selection or provide details about the evidence base reviewed.

Children learn to communicate via real-time behavioural feedback loops with their social partners (e.g. infant vocalizes, caregiver responds and infant learns from the response). Across development, feedback loops become increasingly complex as children master new skills, engage in new activities, interact with a growing network of social partners, and thus elicit a tremendous variety of social responses. For autistic individuals, these feedback loops unfold in distinct ways. Autistic people's social behaviours (like gaze, gestures and language) differ from the behaviours of non-autistic people; as a result, they elicit different input from social partners, which then has cascading impacts on future social behaviour.

Here, we review literature on the mechanisms that underpin social communication development in autism from infancy through adulthood. We discuss how changes in abilities (e.g. motor, cognitive, emotion, communication), social demands and environmental contexts (e.g. interactions with peers) influence the social contingency experiences of autistic individuals. We propose that differences in real-time behavioural feedback loops contribute, in part, to broader developmental trends in autism (e.g. the pace of language learning). Research from neurodiverse samples offers insights into how feedback loops facilitate social communicative development broadly and has real-world implications for clinical and educational initiatives.

This article is part of the theme issue 'Mechanisms of learning from social interaction'.