Abstract
A leading hypothesis to explain the social dysfunction in people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is that they exhibit a deficit in reward processing and motivation specific to social stimuli. However, there have been few direct tests of this hypothesis to date. Here we used an instrumental reward learning task that contrasted learning with social rewards (pictures of positive and negative faces) against learning with monetary reward (winning and losing money). The two tasks were structurally identical except for the type of reward, permitting direct comparisons. We tested 10 high-functioning people with ASD (7M, 3F) and 10 healthy controls who were matched on gender, age, and education. We found no significant differences between the two groups in terms of overall ability behaviorally to discriminate positive from negative slot machines, reaction-times, and valence ratings, However, there was a specific impairment in the ASD group in learning to choose social rewards, compared to monetary rewards: they had a significantly lower cumulative number of choices of the most rewarding social slot machine, and had a significantly slower initial learning rate for the socially rewarding slot machine, compared to the controls. The findings show a deficit in reward learning in ASD that is greater for social rewards than for monetary rewards, and support the hypothesis of a disproportionate impairment in social reward processing in ASD.
Highlights
Underlying the abnormal social behavior of autism may be social motivation deficits
Turning to the choice data from the main task, we found that both groups reliably learned to select the slot machine associated with the highest probability of a positive-valenced outcome for both social and non-social rewards, and to avoid the slot machine associated with the highest probability of a negatively valenced outcome (Figure 3)
We investigated the hypothesis that people with autism spectrum disorder would show a disproportionate impairment in processing social rewards
Summary
The social motivation hypothesis, attributes the social dysfunction to a deficit in reward processing and motivation specific to social stimuli (Dawson et al, 1998, 2002; Grelotti et al, 2002; Chevallier et al, 2012) In this framework, early-onset impairments in social motivation and attention set in motion developmental differences that deprive the child of adequate social learning experiences, which leads to disruption in social skill and social cognition developments. While non-ASD children have increased pupillary diameter to happy faces with direct gaze over averted gaze, children with ASD do not (Sepeta et al, 2012) These differences in individuals with ASD may be reflective of reduced reward motivation for social stimuli
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