Decision making under uncertainty across the lifespan: Cognitive, motivational and neural bases

美国的老龄化人口正在迅速增加。老年人面临着复杂的财务和医疗决策，这对他们自己和他们的家庭都有重大影响。因此，与年轻人相比，老年人在财务上犯的错误更多，而且他们越来越多地受到周围人的剥削，这一点值得高度关注。大多数这些决定的一个关键方面是，它们是在高度不确定的条件下做出的。因此，不确定性下的行为变化可能是衰老过程中决策变化的基础。然而，这些转变的认知和动机基础在很大程度上是未知的。了解这些基础是很重要的，因为它可以指导开发个性化的决策辅助工具。该项目旨在描述金融和医疗领域中不确定性态度与年龄相关的变化，并确定这些变化是否取决于从反馈中学习以及对奖惩的敏感性方面与年龄相关的变化。我们的世界是高度不确定和快速变化的。个人对不确定性的态度差异很大：一些人寻求不确定性，而另一些人则不惜一切代价避免不确定性。影响个体不确定性态度的一个重要因素是年龄，然而年龄相关的变化不是统一的，而是与环境相关的。这表明不确定性态度是由几个上下文相关过程之间的相互作用产生的。本项目的研究验证了一个普遍的假设，即决策特征的个体差异与基本认知和动机过程的差异有关，这些基本过程的年龄相关变化解释了决策特征的年龄相关变化。具体来说，这些研究将测试三个基本过程对不确定性态度的贡献：通过从反馈中学习来减少不确定性的能力、对奖励的敏感性和对惩罚的敏感性。研究人员将在一组年龄在18岁至90岁之间的认知健康个体中测试这一假设，使用两个行为任务和一个功能MRI任务。行为任务将评估：(1)个人对多个领域（金钱收益、金钱损失和医疗）不确定性的态度，以及(2)个人从反馈中灵活学习的能力。功能性神经成像将用于测量神经对预期奖励和惩罚的反应。静息状态功能磁共振成像也将被测量，以评估与评估、学习和选择有关的大脑区域之间功能连接的年龄相关变化。所有收集到的数据将存储在一个开放的神经影像学数据平台上，供其他研究者公开使用。本研究将对学习和奖惩处理在个体不确定性态度中的作用以及这些态度与年龄相关的变化有一个详细的了解。这一认识将为未来老年人决策的神经基础研究以及政策制定和决策辅助提供约束。它也将作为纵向和患者研究的基础。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The aging population in the United States is rapidly rising. Older adults face complicated financial and healthcare decisions, which carry substantial consequences for themselves and for their families. It is therefore of high concern that older adults make more financial mistakes compared to their younger counterparts, and that they are increasingly subjected to exploitation by the people around them. A crucial aspect of most of these decisions is that they are made under conditions of high uncertainty. Shifts in behavior under uncertainty may therefore underlie some of the changes in decision making in aging. The cognitive and motivational bases for these shifts, however, are largely unknown. Understanding these bases is important, because it may guide the development of individually-tailored decision aids. This project aims to characterize age-related changes in uncertainty attitudes in the financial and medical domains, and to determine whether these depend on age-related changes in learning from feedback and in sensitivity to rewards and punishments. Our world is highly uncertain and rapidly changing. Individuals vary substantially in their attitudes towards uncertainty: some seek it, while others avoid it at all costs. An important factor that affects individual uncertainty attitudes is age, yet age-related changes are not uniform, but rather they are context-dependent. This suggests that uncertainty attitudes result from interactions between several context-dependent processes. The studies conducted in this project test the general hypothesis that individual differences in decision traits are linked to differences in basic cognitive and motivational processes, and that age-related changes in these basic processes account for age-related changes in decision traits. Specifically, the studies will test the contribution of three basic processes to uncertainty attitudes: the ability to reduce uncertainty by learning from feedback, sensitivity to rewards, and sensitivity to punishments. The researchers will test this hypothesis in a group of cognitively healthy individuals between the ages of 18 and 90, using two behavioral tasks and one functional MRI task. The behavioral tasks will evaluate: (1) individual attitudes towards uncertainty in multiple domains (money gains, money losses and medical treatments), and (2) individual ability to flexibly learn from feedback. Functional neuroimaging will be used to measure neural responses to anticipated rewards and punishments. Resting-state fMRI will also be measured, to evaluate age-related changes in functional connectivity between brain areas that are involved in valuation, learning and choice. All collected data will be deposited in an open platform for neuroimaging data for public use by other investigators. The proposed work will lead to a detailed understanding of the role of learning, as well as reward and punishment processing, in individual uncertainty attitudes, and age-related changes in these attitudes. This understanding will provide constraints for future research on the neural basis of decision making, as well as policy making and decision aids for older adults. It will also serve as the basis for longitudinal and patient studies.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.