Abstract
We investigated how adult aging specifically alters economic decision-making, focusing on examining alterations in uncertainty preferences (willingness to gamble) and choice strategies (what gamble information influences choices) within both the gains and losses domains. Within each domain, participants chose between certain monetary outcomes and gambles with uncertain outcomes. We examined preferences by quantifying how uncertainty modulates choice behavior as if altering the subjective valuation of gambles. We explored age-related preferences for two types of uncertainty, risk, and ambiguity. Additionally, we explored how aging may alter what information participants utilize to make their choices by comparing the relative utilization of maximizing and satisficing information types through a choice strategy metric. Maximizing information was the ratio of the expected value of the two options, while satisficing information was the probability of winning. We found age-related alterations of economic preferences within the losses domain, but no alterations within the gains domain. Older adults (OA; 61–80 years old) were significantly more uncertainty averse for both risky and ambiguous choices. OA also exhibited choice strategies with decreased use of maximizing information. Within OA, we found a significant correlation between risk preferences and choice strategy. This linkage between preferences and strategy appears to derive from a convergence to risk neutrality driven by greater use of the effortful maximizing strategy. As utility maximization and value maximization intersect at risk neutrality, this result suggests that OA are exhibiting a relationship between enhanced rationality and enhanced value maximization. While there was variability in economic decision-making measures within OA, these individual differences were unrelated to variability within examined measures of cognitive ability. Our results demonstrate that aging alters economic decision-making for losses through changes in both individual preferences and the strategies individuals employ.
Highlights
Aging has been suggested to result in alterations in numerous cognitive processes, but it is unclear what specific alterations in economic decision making may take place
Relationship between Economic Measures and Cognitive Ability in Older adults (OA) To examine whether differences in cognitive ability within our OA sample may alter economic preferences, we examined the relationships between our economic metrics and cognitive ability within our OA sample
As the choice strategy metric is a combination of two factors, we examine the effects of aging on these factors individually, revealing that the differences were driven by alterations to both components – increased use of the relative expected value (rEV) information [younger adults (YA): t(60) = 8.45, p < 0.0001, d = 1.06; OA: t(34) = 5.13, p < 0.0001, d = 0.94], along with decreased use of the probability of winning in the gamble option (pWIN) information [YA: t(56) = 4.62, p < 0.0001, d = 0.82; OA: t(32) = 2.23, p = 0.033, d = 0.64]
Summary
Aging has been suggested to result in alterations in numerous cognitive processes, but it is unclear what specific alterations in economic decision making may take place. Prior studies utilizing decision making tasks have suggested alterations across a range of tasks, including the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT; Denburg et al, 2005, 2009; Wood et al, 2005; Fein et al, 2007; Zamarian et al, 2008; Baena et al, 2010; Carvalho et al, 2012), the Gambling Task (Kovalchik et al, 2005), Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART; Henninger et al, 2010; Rolison et al, 2012), and the Cambridge Gambling Task (CGT; Deakin et al, 2004; Henninger et al, 2010) It is unclear whether such studies reflect specific alterations in economic decision making, as these tasks feature outcome resolution at the end of each trial. The former account is supported by some (Henninger et al, 2010; Boyle et al, 2011) but not other studies (Anderson et al, 2013)
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