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Incentive Value of Social Signals in Typical Development and Autism.
Objectives: A novel interactive eye-
Methods: A group of typically developing toddlers (n = 32, 3-4 years old) and a group of typical adults (n = 32, 18-45 years old) (study 1) as well as two groups of typical and autistic children (n = 58, 6-18years old, study 2) completed the interactive eye-tracking task. The participants observed a stimulus display consisting of two peripherally presented dynamic social signals (faces) and a centrally presented reward. Participants' eye movements were concurrently recorded with an eye-tracker, and the location of participant's fixation triggered the delivery of corresponding stimuli on-line. Fixation on each face triggered a dynamic sequence of signals and subsequent delivery of a reward, which was a popular animated cartoon, or a penalty, a blank screen. Two types of social signals were presented. An engaging social signal consisted in a person greeting and turning towards the centre of the screen while the other non-engaging social signal consisted in a person moaning and turning away from it. Engaging social signals triggered reward delivery for half the participants of each group, and non-engaging social signals for the other half of the participants of each group.
Results: Preliminary analyses revealed that both typically developing toddlers and adults (study 1) and both groups of children with and without autism (study 2) were able to learn the association between either of the social signals and the subsequent reward delivery
Conclusions: These preliminary results sho
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