Reward learning modulates the attentional processing of faces in children with and without autism spectrum disorder.
Pairing faces with rewards speeds visual search in ASD, even if learning the pairings takes longer.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team showed kids a game where some faces were linked to prizes.
Children with autism and typical kids both played.
The kids had to find the prize-linked face in a crowd as fast as they could.
What they found
Both groups sped up when the prize face was there.
Kids with autism learned the prize links more slowly, but once learned the faces still grabbed their eyes.
Reward pairing can boost attention to faces in ASD, even if teaching the pairing takes longer.
How this fits with other research
McCormick et al. (2025) saw weaker brain responses to social rewards in ASD.
The new study shows the boost still shows up in behavior, so the brain blunting does not block the effect.
Kinard et al. (2020) found mixed brain signals during social reward learning in teens.
Together the papers say: teaching may need extra trials, but the payoff still works.
Why it matters
You can use small prizes to make faces more salient during social skills training.
Expect slower learning of the prize link, so give more practice trials.
Once the link is set, the child’s eyes should move faster to the adult’s face, a win for joint-attention drills.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
UNLABELLED: The processing of social stimuli, such as human faces, is impaired in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which could be accounted for by their lack of social motivation. The current study examined how the attentional processing of faces in children with ASD could be modulated by the learning of face-reward associations. Sixteen high-functioning children with ASD and 20 age- and ability-matched typically developing peers participated in the experiments. All children started with a reward learning task, in which the children were presented with three female faces that were attributed with positive, negative, and neutral values, and were required to remember the faces and their associated values. After this, they were tested on the recognition of the learned faces and a visual search task in which the learned faces served as the distractor. We found a modulatory effect of the face-reward associations on the visual search but not the recognition performance in both groups despite the lower efficacy among children with ASD in learning the face-reward associations. Specifically, both groups responded faster when one of the distractor faces was associated with positive or negative values than when the distractor face was neutral, suggesting an efficient attentional processing of these reward-associated faces. Our findings provide direct evidence for the perceptual-level modulatory effect of reward learning on the attentional processing of faces in individuals with ASD. Autism Res 2017, 10: 1797-1807. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: In our study, we tested whether the face processing of individuals with ASD could be changed when the faces were associated with different social meanings. We found no effect of social meanings on face recognition, but both groups responded faster in the visual search task when one of the distractor faces was associated with positive or negative values than when the neutral face. The findings suggest that children with ASD could efficiently process faces associated with different values like typical children.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2017 · doi:10.1002/aur.1823