Social reward anticipation in infants as revealed by event-related potentials

Abstract

ABSTRACT Infants engage in gaze interaction from the early stage of life. Emerging studies suggest that infants may expect social reward of shared attention before looking to the same object with another person. However, it was unknown about the neural responses during the anticipation of social rewards before shared attention in infants. We tested infants’ reward anticipations in the gaze cueing situation measured by event-related potentials in the social association learning task. Six- to ten-month-old infants (N = 20) repeatedly observed that a female predictively looked toward the animation position (valid condition) or another female looking away from the animation (invalid condition). It was posited that infants could learn associations between female faces and the event of shared attention. The results showed that the stimulus preceding negativity which reflects reward anticipation before the animation presentation was elicited in the second half of the learning phases in the valid condition. Additionally, after the presentation of the face, N290 was greater in the second half of the learning phase than in the first half in the valid condition. These results suggest that infants can anticipate social reward from gaze cues, and learning the gaze cueing validity may affect not only reward anticipation but face perception.