Author: dziobeklab

Social rewards are often compared in experimental designs with non-social ones: a popular pair is money (non-social) vs. a smile (social). However, we often forget that money and smiles differ on many more dimensions than just sociality. For example, money is tangible, but a smile is not. Can we then draw informative conclusions about the differences in the brain processing of social and non-social rewards? We argue that to do so, we need to use a multidimensional view on rewards.

Persons with autism may be experiencing troubles interacting socially with others because of a decreased sensitivity of their brains to social stimuli (like faces, speech, gestures, etc.). Because autism is a spectrum reaching from neurotypical persons with little or no autistic traits on one end and low-functioning persons with autism on the other, we measured brain responses to social and non-social rewards in 50+ neurotypical (i.e. not diagnosed with autism) participants differing in their levels of autistic traits. Our results show that autistic traits even in neurotypical participants influence how their brains process rewards!