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

美国的老龄化人口正在迅速上升。老年人面临着复杂的财务和医疗保健决定，这对他们自己和他们的家庭都有重大影响。因此，令人高度关注的是，与年轻人相比，老年人在财务上犯的错误更多，他们越来越多地受到周围人的剥削。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决策的一些变化的基础。然而，这些转变的认知和动机基础在很大程度上是未知的。理解这些基础很重要，因为它可以指导个性化决策辅助工具的开发。该项目旨在描述金融和医疗领域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度与年龄相关的变化。我们的世界高度不确定，变化迅速。每个人对不确定性的态度有很大不同：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，然而与年龄相关的变化并不是一成不变的，而是与背景相关的。这表明，不确定性态度是几个与环境相关的过程之间相互作用的结果。这个项目中进行的研究检验了一个普遍的假设，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，这些基本过程中的年龄相关变化解释了决策特征的年龄相关变化。具体地说，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，以及对惩罚的敏感性。研究人员将在一组年龄在18岁到90岁之间的认知健康的人身上，使用两项行为任务和一项功能磁共振任务来测试这一假设。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。功能神经成像将被用来测量对预期奖惩的神经反应。还将测量静息状态的功能磁共振成像，以评估与评估、学习和选择有关的大脑区域之间与年龄相关的功能连接的变化。所有收集的数据将存储在一个开放的平台上，供其他研究人员公开使用神经成像数据。拟议的工作将导致详细了解学习以及奖惩处理在个人不确定性态度中的作用，以及这些态度随年龄的变化。这一理解将为今后关于决策的神经基础的研究以及老年人的政策制定和决策辅助提供限制。它还将作为纵向和患者研究的基础。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势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.