Data from: Social seeking declines during preadolescence

The desire to engage with others is an important motivational force throughout our lifespan. It is known that social behaviour and preferences change from childhood to adulthood, but if this change is linked with any changes in social motivation, is not known. We evaluated 255 typically developing participants from ages 4-20 years on a behavioural paradigm “Choose a Movie” (CAM). On every trial, participants had a choice between viewing social or non-social movies presented with different levels of effort (number of key presses required). Hence participants chose not only the movie they would watch but also how much effort they would make. The difference between the effort levels of the chosen and not chosen stimuli helps in quantifying the motivation to seek it. As this is a simple choice task it could be used with all the age groups with minimal adaptations, allowing comparison between the groups. Results showed that both young children (4-8years) and older adolescents (16-20 years) made more effort to look at social movies. Counterintuitively, this preference declined during preadolescence (around 11-14 years), giving a U-shaped developmental trajectory over the whole population. We present the first evidence for non-monotonic developmental change in social motivation in typical participants.