Abstract
The "Choose-a-Movie-CAM" is an established task to quantify the motivation for seeking social rewards. It allows participants to directly assess both the stimulus value and the effort required to obtain it. In the present study, we aimed to identify the neural mechanisms of such cost-benefit decision-making. To this end, functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging data were collected from 24 typical adults while they completed the CAM task. We partly replicated the results from our previous behavioural studies showing that typical adults prefer social over object stimuli and low effort over higher effort stimuli but found no interaction between the two. Results from neuroimaging data suggest that there are distinct neural correlates for social and object preferences. The precuneus and medial orbitofrontal cortex, two key areas involved in social processing are engaged when participants make a social choice. Areas of the ventral and dorsal stream pathways associated with object recognition are engaged when making an object choice. These activations can be seen during the decision phase even before the rewards have been consumed, indicating a transfer the hedonic properties of social stimuli to its cues. We also found that the left insula and bilateral clusters in the inferior occipital gyrus and the inferior parietal lobule were recruited for increasing effort investment. We discuss limitations and implications of this study which reveals the distinct neural correlates for social and object rewards, using a robust behavioural measure of social motivation.
Highlights
Every day we make decisions regarding the level of social engagement we choose to have with others around us
Our data partly replicates the behavioural findings of Dubey et al (2015) showing that typical adults generally prefer social over object stimuli irrespective of the levels of relative efforts between two choices
We found that making social over object choices is linked with activations in brain regions previously associated with social processing, that is, the medial orbital gyrus and the precuneus
Summary
Every day we make decisions regarding the level of social engagement we choose to have with others around us. The social motivation theory assumes that adults under usual conditions intrinsically assign high values to social stimuli in their environment and that this impacts their decision-making (Chevallier, Kohls, Troiani, Brodkin, & Schultz, 2012). Evidence for this emerges during early development, with infants looking more at faces rather than nonface images (Gliga, Elsabbagh, Andravizou, & Johnson, 2009; Goren, Sarty, & Wu, 1975). The aim of the current study is to explore and identify the neural systems that support social and nonsocial choices in typically developing adults, to help direct future research aiming to understand how these processes may be operating differently in autism spectrum conditions (ASC)
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