Data from: 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. In the current study, 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, both children and adults learned the cue-reward association faster and more efficiently than when the reward-predictive cue was social but non-engaging. These new findings indicate that social engaging cues have a positive incentive value. This could possibly be because they usually coincide with positive outcomes in real life, which could partly drive the development of social orienting.

尽管已有诸多研究证实，婴儿与成人会优先将注意力定向于社会性刺激（social stimuli），但目前仍不清楚是什么因素驱动了这类优先定向行为。有研究提出，社会性线索（social cues）与后续奖赏递送之间的习得性联结，可能塑造了这类社会性定向行为。本研究采用一种用于强化学习（reinforcement learning）的新型自发性指标（借助眼动相依式奖赏学习任务），探究了参与者的视觉注意力与奖赏结果之间的联结，是否能够引发儿童与成人对社会性及非社会性视觉线索的定向行为。尤为关键的是，本研究评估了社会性线索的唤起性是否会对强化学习过程产生影响。在本研究中，儿童与成人均更频繁地将注意力定向于与奖赏递送相关联的视觉线索，证实了线索-奖赏联结能够强化视觉定向行为。更为重要的是，当奖赏预测线索具备社会性且具有唤起性时，儿童与成人学习线索-奖赏联结的速度与效率，均显著高于奖赏预测线索为社会性但无唤起性的情况。本研究的全新发现表明，具备唤起性的社会性线索具有正向激励价值。这可能是因为在现实生活中，这类线索通常与正向结果相伴，而这或许会在一定程度上推动社会性定向行为的发展。