Exploratory decision-making as a function of lifelong experience, not cognitive decline.
Exploratory decision-making as a function of lifelong experience, not cognitive decline.
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DOI：
10.1037/xge0000133
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发表时间：
2016-03
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Maddox WT
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Blanco NJ;Love BC;Ramscar M;Otto AR;Smayda K;Maddox WT
在一些复杂的决策场景中，老年人的表现比年轻人差，这通常归因于纹状体和额纹状体处理的年龄相关下降。最近，这一流行的说法受到了一些工作的挑战，这些工作考虑了老年人的表现如何因知识和经验的增加而有所不同，并且有工作表明，在某些情况下，老年人在复杂的决策任务中表现优于年轻人。鉴于这一争议，我们研究了老年人和年轻人在探索性选择任务中的表现，该任务适用于基于模型的分析，并且表面上不依赖于先验知识。探索是决策的一个重要方面，人们在一生中对它的了解很少。在两个实验中，我们解决了（a）老年人和年轻人在探索性选择方面的差异以及（B）观察到的差异在多大程度上反映了处理能力的下降。基于模型的分析表明，所使用的策略，由2组有质的不同，导致相对较差的性能为老年人在1决策环境，但在另一个性能相同。很少有证据表明，在处理能力的差异驱动性能差异。相反，结果表明，老年人的表现可能是由于应用了一种策略，这种策略可能是由他们丰富的现实决策经验塑造的。虽然这种策略在真实的世界中可能是有效的，但它不适合某些决策环境。这些结果强调了在老龄化研究中考虑经验影响的重要性，即使对于那些没有明显利用过去经验的任务也是如此。
Older adults perform worse than younger adults in some complex decision-making scenarios, which is commonly attributed to age-related declines in striatal and frontostriatal processing. Recently, this popular account has been challenged by work that considered how older adults’ performance may differ as a function of greater knowledge and experience, and by work showing that, in some cases, older adults outperform younger adults in complex decision-making tasks. In light of this controversy, we examined the performance of older and younger adults in an exploratory choice task that is amenable to model-based analyses and ostensibly not reliant on prior knowledge. Exploration is a critical aspect of decision-making poorly understood across the life span. Across 2 experiments, we addressed (a) how older and younger adults differ in exploratory choice and (b) to what extent observed differences reflect processing capacity declines. Model-based analyses suggested that the strategies used by the 2 groups were qualitatively different, resulting in relatively worse performance for older adults in 1 decision-making environment but equal performance in another. Little evidence was found that differences in processing capacity drove performance differences. Rather the results suggested that older adults’ performance might result from applying a strategy that may have been shaped by their wealth of real-word decision-making experience. While this strategy is likely to be effective in the real world, it is ill suited to some decision environments. These results underscore the importance of taking into account effects of experience in aging studies, even for tasks that do not obviously tap past experiences.