Gaze-contingent reinforcement learning reveals incentive value of social signals in young children and adults.
Gaze-contingent reinforcement learning reveals incentive value of social signals in young children and adults.
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DOI：
10.1098/rspb.2016.2747
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发表时间：
2017-03-15
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Senju A
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Vernetti A;Smith TJ;Senju A
虽然许多研究表明，婴儿和成年人倾向于社会刺激，但仍然不清楚是什么驱动了这种优先定向。有人认为，社会线索和随后的奖励传递之间的学习关联可能会塑造这样的社会定向。使用一种新的，自发的强化学习指示（使用凝视条件奖励学习任务），我们调查了儿童和成人的定向社会和非社会视觉线索是否可以通过参与者的视觉注意力和奖励结果之间的关联引起。关键是，我们评估了社会线索的参与性质是否会影响强化学习的过程。儿童和成人都学会了更经常地定向到与奖励传递相关的视觉线索，这表明线索奖励关联加强了视觉定向。更重要的是，当奖励预测线索是社会性的和参与性的时，儿童和成人都比奖励预测线索是社会性的但不参与时更快、更有效地学习线索-奖励关联。这些新发现表明，社会参与线索具有积极的激励价值。这可能是因为它们通常与真实的生活中的积极结果相吻合，这可能部分推动了社会定向的发展。
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. 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.