Chapter 3 - Decision Neuroscience and Aging

Abstract

Over the past several years, a subfield of the cognitive neuroscience of aging has emerged to investigate age differences in reward-based decision making across adulthood. The approach combines experimental methods, models, and theory from psychology, economics, and neuroscience to characterize age differences in decision making in the laboratory and in the real world. This chapter reviews what is presently known about how age differences in the structure and function of frontostriatal brain systems supporting reward-based decision making are related to age differences in sensitivity to monetary gains and losses, intertemporal decision making, risky decision making, and reward learning. Already this work has identified interesting divergent patterns across adulthood; in some situations, the elderly outperform young adults and in other situations they appear to make more mistakes. Taken together, the evidence suggests that older adults do well when making decisions that rely on accumulated life experience, and perform suboptimally in uncertain environments that require the fluid integration of novel information.