Centre for Autism, School of Psychology & Clinical Language Sciences, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom.
Institute of Applied Sciences and Intelligent Systems, National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Messina, Italy.
PLoS One. 2022 Jun 1;17(6):e0265587. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0265587. eCollection 2022.
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.
儿童通常更喜欢关注社会刺激（例如，人脸、微笑）而不是非社会刺激（例如，自然场景、家居用品）。这种对社会刺激的偏好被认为是后来社交技能和健康社交发展的重要基石。社会刺激的偏好通常使用被动观察或工具选择范式来衡量，但不能同时使用两种。由于这些范式可能涉及不同的机制，因此本研究通过在重叠样本上同时使用这两种范式来解决这一差距。在这项研究中，我们使用偏好性注视任务和工具选择任务来测量 3-9 岁正常发育儿童对社会刺激的偏好。儿童在偏好性注视任务中注视社会刺激的时间更长，但在工具选择任务中对社会奖励没有表现出类似的偏好。这两个范式中的任务表现没有相关性。社会技能与选择任务中对社会奖励的偏好呈正相关。这项研究指出了社会刺激偏好的潜在不同机制，并强调了在衡量这一结构时选择范式的重要性。
