Reward sensitivity to faces versus objects in children: an ERP study

Abstract

How children respond to social and nonsocial rewards has important implications for understanding social cognitive development. Adults find faces intrinsically rewarding. However, little is known about how children respond to face vs nonface rewards. We utilized event-related potentials (the stimulus-preceding negativity, SPN) to measure differences in reward anticipation during a guessing game in 6- to 8-year-olds. Children were presented with reward indicators accompanied by incidental face or nonface stimuli. Nonface stimuli were comprised of scrambled faces in the shape of arrows, controlling for low-level properties of the two conditions. Children showed an increased SPN when the reward stimuli were accompanied by faces, relative to nonface stimuli. This suggests that children find a face stimulus more rewarding than a nonface stimulus. The results have important implications for processing social vs nonsocial rewards in typically developing children, and allow testing of populations with deficits in social reward processing, such as autism spectrum disorder.

Face Perception and Learning in Autism Spectrum Disorders

“…Though difficult to test empirically, several studies to date have used images of faces as signifiers of social reward (e.g., Delmonte et al, 2012; Kohls et al, 2011; Scott-Van Zeeland, Dapretto, Ghahremani, Poldrack, & Bookheimer, 2010). Neural response (and thus reward value) for faces appears to be diminished for children with ASD relative to their peers (Delmonte et al, 2012; Scott-Van Zeeland et al, 2010; Stavropoulos & Carver, 2014). However, findings are not entirely consistent, as documented by an alternative approach comparing level of effort (rate of key presses) exhibited to view images of faces versus non-face objects (Ewing, Pellicano, & Rhodes, 2013).…”

Social Preference and Glutamatergic Dysfunction: Underappreciated Prerequisites for Social Dysfunction in Schizophrenia

“…For example, both younger children (around 24 months) [10] and older children (between 9 and 17 years) [11] show greater difficulty disengaging attention away from social compared to nonsocial stimuli. Brain-based measures such as event-related potentials (EPRs) reveal that children aged 6–8 years old have larger EPRs, reflecting greater sensitivity, to social reward compared to nonsocial reward [12]. …”

Neural mirroring mechanisms and imitation in human infants

“…Indeed, work with children and adults shows that mu rhythm desynchronization is greater when an observed act occurs in the context of joint action with another person [112,113]. The neural correlates of such 'social attention' deserve further investigation, particularly given the new developmental neuroscience work on social interaction, attention and reward in typically developing children [114,115] and children with autism [116,117].…”