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Updated: Sep 21, 2025
An Electrophysiology Protocol to Measure Reward Anticipation and Processing in Children
Published on: October 4, 2018
Quantifying preference for social stimuli in young children using two tasks on a mobile platform
Indu Dubey1, Simon Brett1, Liliana Ruta2
1Centre for Autism, School of Psychology & Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom.
Insights
Children prefer social stimuli, but results differ between passive viewing and choice tasks. Social skills link to choice task preferences, suggesting varied mechanisms for social stimulus preference.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Social Neuroscience
Background:
- Children's preference for social stimuli is crucial for social development.
- Existing research often uses only passive viewing or choice tasks to measure this preference.
- These different paradigms may assess distinct underlying mechanisms.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate if preferential looking and instrumental choice tasks yield similar results for social stimulus preference in children.
- To explore the relationship between these two measurement paradigms.
- To examine the connection between social stimulus preference and children's social skills.
Main Methods:
- Employed a preferential looking task and an instrumental choice task.
- Recruited typically developing children aged 3-9 years.
- Assessed preference for social vs. non-social stimuli and social rewards.
Main Results:
- Children looked longer at social stimuli in the preferential looking task.
- No similar preference for social rewards was observed in the instrumental choice task.
- Performance on the two tasks was uncorrelated; social skills correlated positively with choice task preference.
Conclusions:
- Preferential looking and instrumental choice tasks may measure different aspects of social stimulus preference.
- The choice of paradigm is critical for assessing social preference.
- Social skills are associated with actively choosing social rewards, not just passive attention.
Abstract:
Children typically prefer to attend to social stimuli (e.g. faces, smiles) over non-social stimuli (e.g. natural scene, household objects). This preference for social stimuli is believed to be an essential building block for later social skills and healthy social development. Preference for social stimuli are typically measured using either passive viewing or instrumental choice paradigms, but not both. Since these paradigms likely tap into different mechanisms, the current study addresses this gap by administering both of these paradigms on an overlapping sample. In this study, we use a preferential looking task and an instrumental choice task to measure preference for social stimuli in 3-9 year old typically developing children. Children spent longer looking at social stimuli in the preferential looking task but did not show a similar preference for social rewards on the instrumental choice task. Task performance in these two paradigms were not correlated. Social skills were found to be positively related to the preference for social rewards on the choice task. This study points to putatively different mechanisms underlying the preference for social stimuli, and highlights the importance of choice of paradigms in measuring this construct.
