Abstract
The opinions of others have a profound influence on decision making in adults. The impact of social influence appears to change during childhood, but the underlying mechanisms and their development remain unclear. We tested 125 neurotypical children between the ages of 6 and 14 years on a perceptual decision task about 3D-motion figures under informational social influence. In these children, a systematic bias in favor of the response of another person emerged at around 12 years of age, regardless of whether the other person was an age-matched peer or an adult. Drift diffusion modeling indicated that this social influence effect in neurotypical children was due to changes in the integration of sensory information, rather than solely a change in decision behavior. When we tested a smaller cohort of 30 age- and IQ-matched autistic children on the same task, we found some early decision bias to social influence, but no evidence for the development of systematic integration of social influence into sensory processing for any age group. Our results suggest that by the early teens, typical neurodevelopment allows social influence to systematically bias perceptual processes in a visual task previously linked to the dorsal visual stream. That the same bias did not appear to emerge in autistic adolescents in this study may explain some of their difficulties in social interactions.
Highlights
Decisions in everyday life rarely occur in a social vacuum
Using a single advisor and a perceptual stereomotion task, we examined the developmental trajectory of social influence integration in neurotypical children between the ages of 6 and 14 y and in a small cohort of age- and IQ-matched autistic children
Behavioral results and those from drift diffusion modeling show a clear developmental change for neurotypical children in behavior and information processing around the age of 12 y
Summary
To assess whether integration of social influence resulted in a consistent bias in perceptual reports, cumulative Gaussian functions were fitted to the normalized, pooled behavioral responses for each age and experimental group (Fig. 3). We tested the same perceptual decision-making paradigm using peer advice (Fig. 2B) in a group (n = 30) of autistic children (ages 6 to 8, 9 to 11, and 12 to 14 y) When we compared their results to those from ageand IQ-matched neurotypical children, we found a significant difference in behavioral responses between autistic children and the matched neurotypical children (diagnosis) [ANOVA; F(1,88) = 7.91, P = 0.005] and a significant interaction of diagnosis and social influence [F(2,88) = 11.447, P < 0.001].
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