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

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 stimulu...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social cognitive and affective neuroscience 2014-10, Vol.9 (10), p.1569-1575
Main Authors: Stavropoulos, Katherine K M, Carver, Leslie J
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis of Variance
Child
Electroencephalography
Evoked Potentials, Visual - physiology
Face
Female
Humans
Male
Original
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Photic Stimulation
Reaction Time - physiology
Reward
Social Behavior
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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.
ISSN:1749-5016
1749-5024
DOI:10.1093/scan/nst149