Gaze-contingent reinforcement learning reveals incentive value of social signals in young children and adults.

ABSTRACT: 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 ofte

SUBMITTER: Vernetti A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5360925 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature