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Updated: Aug 25, 2025
An Electrophysiology Protocol to Measure Reward Anticipation and Processing in Children
Published on: October 4, 2018
Social reward anticipation in infants as revealed by event-related potentials
Mitsuhiko Ishikawa1,2, Shoji Itakura1
1Centre for Baby Science, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan.
Insights
Infants anticipate social rewards from gaze cues, showing distinct neural responses during learning. This suggests early social learning influences reward anticipation and face perception in babies.
Area of Science:
- Developmental Psychology
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Infant Social Cognition
Background:
- Infants engage in gaze interaction early in life.
- Emerging research suggests infants may anticipate social rewards before shared attention.
- Neural mechanisms underlying reward anticipation before shared attention in infants remain unclear.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate infants' neural responses during the anticipation of social rewards before shared attention.
- To examine reward anticipation using event-related potentials (ERPs) in a gaze cueing paradigm.
- To explore how infants learn associations between faces and shared attention events.
Main Methods:
- Utilized a social association learning task with event-related potentials (ERPs).
- Tested 20 infants aged 6-10 months in a gaze cueing situation.
- Infants observed predictive gaze cues (valid vs. invalid) toward animation targets.
Main Results:
- A stimulus preceding negativity (SPN), reflecting reward anticipation, was observed in the valid condition during later learning phases.
- The N290 component, associated with face perception, showed increased amplitude in the valid condition after learning.
- These findings indicate infants develop expectations of social rewards based on gaze cues.
Conclusions:
- Infants demonstrate the ability to anticipate social rewards signaled by gaze cues.
- Learning the validity of gaze cues impacts both reward anticipation and face perception in infants.
- This study provides insights into the early neural mechanisms of social learning and reward processing.
Abstract:
Infants engage in gaze interaction from the early stage of life. Emerging studies suggest that infants may expect social reward of shared attention before looking to the same object with another person. However, it was unknown about the neural responses during the anticipation of social rewards before shared attention in infants. We tested infants' reward anticipations in the gaze cueing situation measured by event-related potentials in the social association learning task. Six- to ten-month-old infants (N = 20) repeatedly observed that a female predictively looked toward the animation position (valid condition) or another female looking away from the animation (invalid condition). It was posited that infants could learn associations between female faces and the event of shared attention. The results showed that the stimulus preceding negativity which reflects reward anticipation before the animation presentation was elicited in the second half of the learning phases in the valid condition. Additionally, after the presentation of the face, N290 was greater in the second half of the learning phase than in the first half in the valid condition. These results suggest that infants can anticipate social reward from gaze cues, and learning the gaze cueing validity may affect not only reward anticipation but face perception.
