Decision making
Do older adults decide worse, or just expect a different world?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
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.
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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Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
How this study connects
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