Gaze-contingent reinforcement learning reveals incentive value of social signals in young children and adults

While numerous studies have demonstrated that infants and adults preferentially orient to social stimuli, it remains unclear as to what drives such preferential orienting. It has been suggested that the learned association between social cues and subsequent reward delivery might shape such social orienting. Using a novel, spontaneous indication of reinforcement learning (with the use of a gaze contingent reward-learning task), we investigated whether children and adults' orienting towards social and non-social visual cues can be elicited by the association between participants' visual attention and a rewarding outcome. Critically, we assessed whether the engaging nature of the social cues influences the process of reinforcement learning. Both children and adults learned to orient more often to the visual cues associated with reward delivery, demonstrating that cue–reward association reinforced visual orienting. More importantly, when the reward-predictive cue was social and engaging, bo...

虽然大量研究已证明婴儿和成人会优先朝向社交刺激，但驱动这种优先朝向的机制仍不明确。有研究指出，社交线索与后续奖励发放之间的习得关联可能塑造了这种社交朝向行为。通过一种新颖的、自发的强化学习指示方法（采用凝视偶发奖励学习任务（gaze contingent reward-learning task）），我们研究了儿童和成人对社交与非社交视觉线索的朝向行为是否可通过参与者视觉注意与奖励结果之间的关联来诱发。关键的是，我们评估了社交线索的吸引特性是否会影响强化学习过程。儿童和成人都学会了更频繁地朝向与奖励发放相关联的视觉线索，这表明线索-奖励关联强化了视觉朝向行为。更重要的是，当奖励预测线索具有社交性且具有吸引力时，bo...