Quantifying preference for social stimuli in young children using two tasks on a mobile platform.
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Authors
Brett, Simon
Ruta, Liliana
Bishain, Rahul
Chandran, Sharat
Estrin, Georgia Lockwood
Johnson, Mark
Gliga, Teodora
Publication Date
2022-06-01Journal Title
PloS one
ISSN
1932-6203
Volume
17
Issue
6
Language
eng
Type
Article
This Version
VoR
Metadata
Show full item recordCitation
Dubey, I., Brett, S., Ruta, L., Bishain, R., Chandran, S., Bhavnani, S., Belmonte, M. K., et al. (2022). Quantifying preference for social stimuli in young children using two tasks on a mobile platform.. PloS one, 17 (6) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265587
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.
Keywords
Humans, Reward, Task Performance and Analysis, Child, Child, Preschool
Sponsorship
Medical Research Council (MR/P023894/1)
Identifiers
PMC9159616, 35648753
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265587
This record's URL: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/338719
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