Do older adults decide worse, or just expect a different world?
Older adults scored lower than younger adults on an explore-or-exploit game only when outcomes were purely random; when change really did become more likely over time, they did just as well.
Source
Exploratory decision-making as a function of lifelong experience, not cognitive decline
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Leapfrog two-option explore/exploit task; Exp 1 compared age groups in the lab on the standard independent version; Exp 2 (online) randomly assigned each age group to an independent or a dependent (jump probability rising over time) environment
- N
- Experiment 1: 58 younger and 52 older adults tested in the lab; Experiment 2 (online): 70 younger and 68 older adults in the independent condition and 69 of each age group in the dependent condition
- Population
- Younger adults (about 17-32) and healthy older adults (60+) from the Austin, Texas community (Exp 1) and from Amazon Mechanical Turk (Exp 2)
- Outcome
- Proportion of choices of the truly better option, exploration rate, reaction time, and the timing pattern of exploratory choices (hazard rates, effect of trials since last observed jump)
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What they did
Participants played the 'leapfrog' task, repeatedly choosing between two options whose rewards occasionally leapfrog each other, so they had to decide when to explore the other option to check whether it had become better. In Experiment 1, younger and older adults played the standard version, in which a jump was equally likely on every trial; older adults were also given neuropsychological tests. In Experiment 2, online younger and older participants were randomly assigned either to that standard independent version or to a dependent version in which the chance of a jump grew with every trial since the last one.
What they found
In Experiment 1, younger adults chose the better option slightly more often and responded faster, but both groups explored on about the same share of trials. Most people in both groups timed their exploration in a strategic, uncertainty-tracking way, though this was somewhat more common in younger adults; older adults, however, explored more the longer it had been since they last saw a jump, as if jumps became 'due', which is wrong in the independent task. Executive-function test scores did not predict older adults' performance. In Experiment 2, younger adults outscored older adults in the independent condition but not in the dependent condition, where the older adults' expectation matched reality.
The limits
What it doesn't show
Age groups were compared at one point in time, so cohort differences cannot be separated from ageing, and the study gives no direct evidence that life experience caused the older adults' strategy, as the authors acknowledge. The claim that real-world environments usually make change more likely over time is speculative. Younger adults were not given the neuropsychological tests, and the older-adult samples were healthy, high-functioning volunteers, with Experiment 2 run online; the Experiment 1 age-by-timing effect was only marginal when replicated in Experiment 2's independent condition. The task is much simpler than real-life decisions.
Key terms
- Exploration vs. exploitation
- Choosing an option to gather information about it (exploring) versus choosing the option currently believed to be best (exploiting).
- Reflective vs. reflexive strategy
- Reflective choice uses a mental model of the task to time exploration by uncertainty; reflexive choice explores at random, without such a model.
- Hazard rate of exploration
- The chance of exploring as a function of how many trials have passed since the last exploratory choice.
- Gambler's fallacy
- Believing an event becomes more likely because it has not happened for a while, even when each trial is independent.
- Knowledge effect
- A performance difference caused by what people have learned or expect from experience, rather than by reduced mental capacity.
- Cohort effect
- A difference between age groups caused by growing up in different times rather than by ageing itself.
Flashcards
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Quiz yourself
In Experiment 1, how did exploration rates differ by age?
Common questions
If older adults scored lower, why isn't this evidence of cognitive decline?
Because they used a demanding, model-based strategy that simply assumed the wrong structure, and they matched younger adults when the environment matched that assumption, which a pure capacity-loss account would not predict.
Is the gambler's fallacy always a mistake?
No. When events really do become more likely over time, like a traffic light turning green, expecting change is correct; it is only a fallacy when outcomes are independent.
Did the experiments show that experience causes the older adults' strategy?
No. The authors propose experience as an explanation but had no direct measure of it, and cross-sectional age comparisons cannot rule out cohort effects.
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