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.

摘要

婴儿从生命的早期阶段就开始进行凝视互动。新出现的研究表明，在与另一个人看同一物体之前，婴儿可能会期待共同关注的社会回报。然而，婴儿在共同注意之前预期社会奖励期间的神经反应尚不清楚。我们测试了婴儿在社会联想学习任务中通过事件相关电位测量的注视提示情境中的奖赏预期。六到十个月大的婴儿 (N = 20) 反复观察到一位女性预测性地看向动画位置（有效条件）或另一位女性从动画中看向别处（无效条件）。据推测，婴儿可以学习女性面孔与共同关注事件之间的关联。结果表明，在有效条件下的学习阶段的后半部分，引发了反映动画呈现前奖励预期的消极性刺激。此外，在面部呈现后，N290 在学习阶段的后半部分大于有效条件下的前半部分。这些结果表明，婴儿可以从凝视线索中预期社交奖励，学习凝视提示的有效性可能不仅会影响奖励预期，还会影响面部知觉。