Age-Related Patterns in Intuition about Risk and Reward

关于风险和回报的直觉中与年龄相关的模式

• 批准号: RGPIN-2017-03906
• 负责人: Shulman, Elizabeth
• 金额: $ 2.19万
• 依托单位: Brock University
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2022-01-01 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=764139
• 关键词: Age; Related; Patterns; Intuition; about

Adolescence has long been recognized as a period of heightened risk taking. Yet, the reasons for this phenomenon remain unclear. The long-term objective of my research is to identify the developmental cognitive processes that contribute to increased risk taking in adolescence. Current theory posits that a rise and fall in reward sensitivity (i.e., how much a person's decision making is affected by potential rewards) across the transition from childhood to adulthood, due to pubertal maturation, produces the observed rise and fall in risk taking; adolescents are thought to weight potential rewards more heavily in risky decision making (i.e., decision making involving potential rewards and losses). However, empirical tests of this model often produce conflicting results, which, I argue, is because studies typically neglect the distinction between decision making based on intuition (“gut feeling”) versus deliberation (careful thought) and the impact of emotional arousal on decision making. Given that much of real-life risk taking occurs in circumstances that (a) favor intuitive over deliberative decision making and (b) excite emotional arousal, it is critical to test the effects of these factors on age related patterns in risky decision making and investigate the mechanisms that explain their effects. My lab will use experimental methods to assess whether adolescents' greater proclivity toward risk taking (relative to adjacent age groups) on laboratory risky decision tasks is amplified by reliance on intuition rather than deliberation and/or by emotional arousal. Using novel, mutimethod approaches we will also examine the age-related pattern in reward sensitivity, how it varies under different conditions (high vs. low arousal and reward salience), and its relation to risk taking. Our studies will include multiple physiological measures of arousal and reactivity to stimuli; we will test which physiological measures are most sensitive to variation in reward magnitude in order to use these data to uncover the mechanisms underlying age differences in risky decision making. For example, these data will enable us to test whether the commonly observed “peer effect”whereby the presence of peers induces adolescents but not adults to make riskier decisionscan be explained by peer presence eliciting greater arousal in adolescents. We will also be the first to compare the effects of different forms of arousal (e.g., due to monetary incentive, peer presence, or peer competition) on age-related patterns in risky decision making and reward sensitivity. Finally, we will use our rich data set to model relations between risk taking, reward sensitivity, and pubertal development across a wide age range (ages 1030).This program of research will help us understand when and why adolescents are more risk-prone than other age groups and will serve as a platform to train many graduate and undergraduate students.

长期以来，人们一直认为青春期是一个风险较高的时期。然而，这种现象的原因仍然不清楚。我的研究的长期目标是确定有助于增加青少年冒险的发展认知过程。目前的理论认为，奖励敏感性的上升和下降（即，一个人的决策受潜在奖励的影响程度），由于青春期成熟，在从童年到成年的过渡中产生了所观察到的风险承担的上升和下降;青少年被认为在风险决策中更重视潜在奖励（即，涉及潜在奖励和损失的决策）。然而，对这一模型的实证检验往往会产生相互矛盾的结果，我认为，这是因为研究通常忽视了基于直觉（“直觉”）与深思熟虑（仔细思考）的决策之间的区别，以及情绪唤起对决策的影响。考虑到现实生活中的许多冒险行为都发生在（a）有利于直觉而不是深思熟虑的决策以及（B）激发情感唤起的情况下，因此测试这些因素对风险决策中与年龄相关的模式的影响并研究解释其影响的机制至关重要。我的实验室将使用实验方法来评估青少年在实验室风险决策任务中更倾向于冒险（相对于相邻年龄组）是否会因依赖直觉而不是深思熟虑和/或情绪激发而放大。使用新的，多方法的方法，我们还将研究奖励敏感性的年龄相关模式，它如何在不同条件下变化（高与低唤醒和奖励显着性），以及它与冒险的关系。 我们的研究将包括唤醒和对刺激的反应的多种生理测量;我们将测试哪些生理测量对奖励幅度的变化最敏感，以便使用这些数据来揭示风险决策中年龄差异的潜在机制。例如，这些数据将使我们能够测试通常观察到的“同伴效应”，即同伴的存在会诱导青少年而不是成年人做出更冒险的决定，是否可以用同伴的存在引起青少年更大的觉醒来解释。我们也将是第一个比较不同形式的唤醒（例如，由于金钱激励、同伴存在或同伴竞争）对风险决策和奖励敏感性中与年龄相关的模式的影响。最后，我们将利用我们丰富的数据集来模拟风险承担，奖励敏感性和青春期发育之间的关系，在很大的年龄范围内（年龄10 - 30岁）。这项研究计划将帮助我们了解青少年何时以及为什么比其他年龄组更容易发生风险，并将作为一个平台来培训许多研究生和本科生。