Age-Related Patterns in Intuition about Risk and Reward

长期以来，青春期一直被认为是一个高风险的时期。然而，造成这种现象的原因尚不清楚。我研究的长期目标是确定导致青少年冒险行为增加的发展认知过程。目前的理论认为，在从童年到成年的过渡时期，由于青春期的成熟，奖励敏感性（即一个人的决策受到潜在奖励的影响程度）的上升和下降产生了观察到的风险承担的上升和下降；青少年被认为在高风险决策（即涉及潜在回报和损失的决策）中更看重潜在回报。然而，这个模型的实证测试经常产生相互矛盾的结果，我认为，这是因为研究通常忽略了基于直觉（“直觉”）和深思熟虑（仔细思考）的决策之间的区别，以及情绪唤醒对决策的影响。考虑到现实生活中的许多冒险行为发生在(a)倾向于直觉而不是深思熟虑的决策和(b)激发情绪唤醒的情况下，测试这些因素对风险决策中年龄相关模式的影响并研究解释其影响的机制是至关重要的。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大的冒险倾向（相对于邻近年龄组）是否由于依赖直觉而不是深思熟虑和/或情绪唤醒而被放大。使用新颖的、多方法的方法，我们还将研究与年龄相关的奖励敏感性模式，它在不同条件下（高唤醒与低唤醒和奖励显著性）是如何变化的，以及它与风险承担的关系。我们的研究将包括对刺激的唤醒和反应的多种生理测量；我们将测试哪些生理指标对奖励幅度的变化最敏感，以便利用这些数据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。我们还将率先比较不同形式的激励（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，我们将使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，这些关系跨越了广泛的年龄范围（10 - 30岁）。这个研究项目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冒险，并将作为培训许多研究生和本科生的平台。

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.