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An Electrophysiology Protocol to Measure Reward Anticipation and Processing in Children
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Reward sensitivity to faces versus objects in children: an ERP study.

Katherine K M Stavropoulos1, Leslie J Carver2

  • 1Psychology Department and Human Development Program, University of California, UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive #0109, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA kmeltzof@ucsd.edu.

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
|September 17, 2013
PubMed
Summary

Children aged 6-8 years show greater anticipation for rewards when paired with faces, indicating faces are more rewarding than non-face stimuli. This research sheds light on social reward processing in development.

Keywords:
childrenevent-related potentialsfacesreward processingsocial motivation

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Area of Science:

  • Developmental Psychology
  • Social Neuroscience
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

Background:

  • Understanding how children process social and nonsocial rewards is crucial for social cognitive development.
  • While adults find faces rewarding, children's responses to face versus non-face rewards are less understood.
  • Event-related potentials offer a method to study reward anticipation in children.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how children (6-8 years) respond to face versus non-face stimuli during reward anticipation.
  • To compare the rewarding value of faces and non-face stimuli in young children.
  • To explore the neural underpinnings of social reward processing in childhood.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized event-related potentials, specifically the stimulus-preceding negativity (SPN), to measure reward anticipation.
  • Employed a guessing game paradigm with 6- to 8-year-old children.
  • Presented reward indicators paired with incidental face stimuli or non-face stimuli (scrambled faces in arrow shapes).

Main Results:

  • Children exhibited an increased SPN when reward indicators were accompanied by face stimuli compared to non-face stimuli.
  • This suggests that faces are perceived as more rewarding than non-face stimuli in this age group.
  • The findings indicate a differential neural response to social versus nonsocial rewards.

Conclusions:

  • Children aged 6-8 years find face stimuli more rewarding than non-face stimuli.
  • This study provides insights into social versus nonsocial reward processing in typically developing children.
  • The methodology can be applied to study populations with social reward processing deficits, like autism spectrum disorder.