Vikram K Jaswal

Vikram Kenneth Jaswal is a developmental psychologist known for his work on autism, particularly augmentative communication supports for nonspeaking autistic people. He holds the position of Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia.

Biography Jaswal earned his B.A. in psychology from Columbia University in 1995. He then attended graduate school at the University of Edinburgh where he obtained his MSc in neuroscience. He then attended Stanford University, where he received his M.A. in psychology in 2000, and his PhD in developmental psychology in 2003. Jaswal's dissertation focused on how three and four-year-old children process linguistic labels assigned to anomalous objects, for which he received the National Institute of Mental Health National Research Service Award predoctoral research grant.

After receiving his PhD, Jaswal moved to the University of Virginia in 2003.

Research Jaswal's initial research focused on learning in typically developing preschool-age children. Some of his early research provided evidence that sad children learn better than happy children. He began researching autism when his daughter was diagnosed with the condition.

Kathrine Beals, affiliated with the Autism Program at Drexel University's School of Education, argued that Jaswal's eye-tracking study "is based on faulty assumptions that undermine both its rationale and its conclusions." Beals criticized the study because it did not use a double-blind message-passing test

Jaswal and his research team used eye-tracking technology during a familiar communication activity to study the visual-motor patterns of nonspeaking autistic participants. In that context, a prompt from a letterboard assistant does not necessarily mean that the assistant authored the message. Jaswal and colleagues reported that autistic participants often shifted their eye gaze to the next target letter before pointing to it.

In 2019, Jaswal and Nameera Akhtar of the University of California, Santa Cruz published a research article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences arguing that some autistic behaviors, including low eye contact, infrequent pointing, motor stereotypies, and echolalia, are often misinterpreted as evidence of low social interest. This article was published with open peer commentaries from more than 30 scholars. Jaswal and Akhtar argued in a related opinion essay that the assumption that autistic people are uninterested in socializing dehumanizes them.

Jaswal's work challenges assumptions that non-speaking autistic people have less intelligence, a lack of social motivation, and cannot think for themselves. His work has highlighted the experiences of non-speaking autistic people, building an insider-based challenge to the negative assumptions about non-speaking autistic people. The idea that autism does not need to be "corrected" is the foundation of the Neurodiversity movement.

Representative publications