Dr John Swettenham

j.swettenham@ucl.ac.uk

John is an associate professor (reader) in the Division of Psychology and Language Science, University College London, UK. He is interested in the development of social communication skills in autistic children and children who cannot use speech as their primary means of expression. His research has looked closely at the development joint attention skills (e.g. following others’ gaze and share attention with others) and he has also studied more general cognitive processes that might influence communication (e.g. proposing an ‘increased perceptual capacity’ in autism and individual differences in biological motion perception). In collaboration with colleagues at Great Ormond Street Hospital and SF State, he examined how to assess functional gaze control, studied the role of attention in communication, worked on a screening tool for visual impairment and developed of an eye gaze classification system for clinical use.