Sobczak Alexandra, Bunzeck Nico
Department of Psychology, University of Lübeck, Ratzeburger Allee 160, 23562, Lübeck, Germany.
Center of Brain, Behavior and Metabolism, University of Lübeck, Ratzeburger Allee 160, 23562, Lübeck, Germany.
NPJ Sci Learn. 2023 Aug 16;8(1):28. doi: 10.1038/s41539-023-00178-7.
Social rewards and punishments are strong motivators. Since experimental work has focused on young adults using simplistic feedback, the effects of more naturalistic stimuli on motivation, evaluative learning, and socio-emotional processing with advanced age remain unclear. Therefore, we compared the effects of static (photos) vs dynamic (videos) social feedback in a social incentive delay (SID) task in young (18-35 years) and older adults (50-84 years) with neutral, positive, and negative feedback, on response times (RTs), and assessed the emotional valence of feedback cues and feedback videos. We found that anticipating positive and negative social feedback accelerated RTs regardless of age and without additional effects of video feedback. Furthermore, the results suggest a valence transfer from positive feedback videos to predictive cues in both groups (i.e., evaluative learning). Finally, older adults reported less pronounced negative affect for negative feedback videos, indicating age differences in socio-emotional processing. As such, our findings foster our understanding of the underlying cognitive and emotional aspects involved in the processing of social rewards and punishments.
社会奖励和惩罚是强大的激励因素。由于实验工作一直聚焦于使用简单反馈的年轻人，更自然主义的刺激对老年人动机、评价性学习和社会情感加工的影响仍不明确。因此，我们在社会激励延迟（SID）任务中，比较了静态（照片）与动态（视频）社会反馈对年轻人（18 - 35岁）和老年人（50 - 84岁）的影响，反馈分为中性、积极和消极三种，观察反应时间（RTs），并评估反馈线索和反馈视频的情感效价。我们发现，无论年龄大小，预期积极和消极的社会反馈都会加快反应时间，且视频反馈没有额外影响。此外，结果表明两组中都存在从积极反馈视频到预测线索的效价转移（即评价性学习）。最后，老年人对负面反馈视频的消极情绪反应较弱，表明社会情感加工存在年龄差异。因此，我们的研究结果有助于加深我们对社会奖励和惩罚加工中潜在认知和情感方面的理解。
