Michelle Garcia Winner does not believe in teaching individuals to look at someone. Instead she wants to them to be able to think with their eyes. As another part of her assessment she looks at something in the room and asks the students both what is she looking at and what is she thinking about. The ADOS assessment definitely looks for the joint attention, for being able to follow someone's eye gaze and to use eye gaze to modulate, but it stops there. One of the bigger lessons Garcia Winner tries to teach is that people are more often than not thinking about what they are looking at. Therefore if you want to let someone know you are thinking about them, you should look in your direction.
This summer, during the Social Skills camp I taught, we placed a eye contact hide and seek game. The idea came from an RDI game one of my clients has taught me. One student would hide an object then come stand in the middle of the room. The "finder" would ask where the object was and the "hider" would have to look in the direction of the object. As the "finder" moved, the "hider" could follow and continue to look at the object. This activity was surprising difficult for both players. The "hiders" wanted to talk or point to help the finder, and the finder often needed some help finding the object and seemed to rely more on the hiders body language than eye gaze.
What have you found to increase eye modulation abilities?
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