Anticipation to Social and Nonsocial Dynamic Cues in Preschool‐Age Children

Abstract

The ability to learn from expectations is foundational to social and nonsocial learning in children. However, we know little about the brain basis of reward expectation in development. Here, 3-to 4-year-olds (N = 26) were shown a passive associative learning paradigm with dynamic stimuli. Anticipation for reward-related stimuli was measured via the stimulus preceding negativity (SPN). To our knowledge, this is the first study to measure an SPN in children younger than age 6. Our findings reveal distinct anticipatory neural signatures for social versus nonsocial stimuli, consistent with previous research in older children. This study suggests an SPN can be elicited in preschoolers and is larger for social than nonsocial stimuli.We are grateful to the children and parents who participated in the study. We also thank Natalie Godfrey and Jacob Radparvar for their efforts toward data collection. Finally, we thank Tiffany Wang for her insightful feedback and efforts toward facilitating recruitment.

Social reward anticipation in infants as revealed by event-related potentials

“…As we predicted, we found that repeated experience of another's valid gaze cueing elicited a larger SPN before the presentation of the animation, suggesting that infants started to anticipate the social reward after learning associations between the face, the validity of gaze cueing, and the events of shared attention. In line with a previous study showing that social cues elicited the SPN at preschool age (Engle et al, 2021), the gaze cues predictive to the social reward of shared attention elicited a larger SPN than invalid gaze cues. This finding suggests that infants around seven months old could learn associations between faces and events of shared attention, and these experiences evoke the social reward anticipations.…”

“…The SPN has been found in three-to four-year-old children within 200 ms prior to the onset of the target and the amplitude was larger for social than non-social stimuli (Engle et al, 2021). To our knowledge, the youngest age in which the SPN can be observed was this age group around three-years-old, however, some physiological studies have shown that infants less than 1year-old can anticipate social rewards.…”

“…The results indicated that with 14 participants in total, we would have achieved above 95% power with an alpha of .05, to find the effects of gaze cueing on infants' face perception indexed by ERPs. The estimated sample size was also sufficient to determine the learning effects of social reward on children's SPNs (f = .55, Engle et al, 2021). Because the interaction effect between gaze and learning on SPNs had not been tested before, we conducted a post-hoc power analysis using the effect size from the current study (ηp 2 = .751).…”

“…An adult study examining the time-course of the SPN has shown that the amplitude of the SPN is the highest just before the presentation of monetary reward (Wang, Li, Nie, & Zheng, 2020), and the SPN has been defined as the mean voltage within 200 ms prior to the reward (see a review in Glazer et al, 2018). In a recent developmental study, Engle et al (2021) has measured ERPs during a passive associative learning paradigm with social and non-social stimuli. In this previous study, preschool children passively observed the sequence of stimuli and learned associations between visual cues and target stimuli (smiling face or toy).…”

“…For each condition, 32 trials were presented, leading to a total of 128 trials (2 gaze conditions x 2 learning phases). The trial number was determined based on a previous study examining the SPN in three-to four-year-olds (Engle et al, 2021). All trials were presented randomly and consecutively without interruption.…”