Adolescents engage in a wide range of risky behaviors that their older peers shun, and at an enormous cost. Despite being older, stronger, and healthier than children, adolescents face twice the risk of mortality and morbidity faced by their younger peers. Are adolescents really risk-seekers or does some richer underlying preference drive their love of the uncertain? To answer that question, we used standard experimental economic methods to assess the attitudes of 65 individuals ranging in age from 12 to 50 toward risk and ambiguity. Perhaps surprisingly, we found that adolescents were, if anything, more averse to clearly stated risks than their older peers. What distinguished adolescents was their willingness to accept ambiguous conditions-situations in which the likelihood of winning and losing is unknown. Though adults find ambiguous monetary lotteries undesirable, adolescents find them tolerable. This finding suggests that the higher level of risk-taking observed among adolescents may reflect a higher tolerance for the unknown. Biologically, such a tolerance may make sense, because it would allow young organisms to take better advantage of learning opportunities; it also suggests that policies that seek to inform adolescents of the risks, costs, and benefits of unexperienced dangerous behaviors may be effective and, when appropriate, could be used to complement policies that limit their experiences.aging | decision making | uncertainty | lifespan A dolescents engage in more reckless, risky, and thrill-seeking behaviors than their younger and older peers (1-3); they have the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases (4) and criminal behaviors (5) of any age group, and even drive faster than adults (6). The mortality and morbidity rates of adolescents are 200% greater than their younger peers, an increase that has been attributed to higher rates of what are traditionally called "risky behaviors." Whatever psychological features give rise to these behaviors, they do not reflect flawed reasoning capabilities or generally poor decision-making skills-those are much improved in adolescents compared with younger children (7).To protect adolescents from the consequences of their decisions, modern societies deploy a range of tools. Legally enforced age limits on gambling, drinking, driving, smoking, being able to open a bank account, and make medical decisions all limit adolescent engagement in high-risk behaviors. Educational programs inform adolescents of the risks and consequences of their behaviors in the hope that they will limit dangerous behaviors on their own.We know that younger children show risk-related behaviors clearly distinct from those of adults (8-10). Why do adolescents make choices that dramatically increase their morbidity and mortality rates compared with younger children (11)? What feature of their decision making leads to these negative consequences? Do adolescents acquire a taste for risk that fades with age, or is a more subtle process at work?To more fully understand behavior in risky si...

Significance Although largely unstudied, behavioral changes in decision making across the life span have implications for problems associated with poor decision making at different life stages, such as careless driving in adolescents and disadvantageous medical or financial decision making in older adults. We examine age-based differences in individual decision-making characteristics—choice consistency, rationality, and preferences for known and unknown risks—in 12- to 90-y-olds. We found that even the healthiest of elders show profoundly compromised decision making, and that risk attitudes show systematic changes across the life span that have important policy implications.

The study of inter-trial effects in visual search has generated an increasing amount of research in recent years. However, the mechanisms underlying these effects are still a matter of debate. Two rival accounts have been suggested. One view stipulates that inter-trial effects facilitate early perceptual/attentional processes, whereas the other proposes that it affects post-perceptual response-related processes. Here, we focused on the priming of pop-out effect (PoP, Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1994), which refers to the well-established finding that performance on singleton search is faster when the target and distractors features repeat on two consecutive trials than when they switch. We set out to resolve the current controversy surrounding PoP by suggesting a dual-stage account, according to which PoP speeds both an early perceptual stage and a later, response-related stage of visual search. We were able to dissociate the hypothesized components of PoP by tracking their time course.

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) produces profound morbidity. Difficulties with decision-making and intolerance of uncertainty are prominent clinical features in many patients. The nature and etiology of these deficits are poorly understood. We used a well-validated choice task, grounded in behavioral economic theory, to investigate differences in valuation and value-based choice during decision making under uncertainty in 20 unmedicated participants with OCD and 20 matched healthy controls. Participants’ choices were used to assess individual decision-making characteristics. OCD participants did not differ from healthy controls in how they valued uncertain options when outcome probabilities were known (risk) but were more likely than healthy controls to avoid uncertain options when these probabilities were imprecisely specified (ambiguity). Compared to healthy controls, individuals with OCD were less consistent in their choices and less able to identify options that should be clearly preferable. These abnormalities correlated with symptom severity. These results suggest that value-based choices during decision-making are abnormal in OCD. Individuals with OCD show elevated intolerance of uncertainty, but only when outcome probabilities are themselves uncertain. Future research focused on the neural valuation network, which is implicated in value-based computations, may provide new neurocognitive insights into the pathophysiology of OCD. Deficits in decision-making processes may represent a target for therapeutic intervention.

Background Psychiatric symptoms typically cut across traditional diagnostic categories. In order to devise individually tailored treatments, there is a need to identify the basic mechanisms that underlie these symptoms. Behavioral economics provides a framework for studying these mechanisms at the behavioral level. Here, we utilized this framework to examine a widely ignored aspect of trauma-related symptomatology—individual uncertainty attitudes—in combat veterans with and without posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Methods Fifty-seven combat veterans, including 30 with PTSD and 27 without PTSD, completed a risk and ambiguity decision-making task that characterizes individual uncertainty attitudes, distinguishing between attitudes toward uncertain outcomes with known (“risk”) and unknown (“ambiguity”) probabilities, and between attitudes toward uncertain gains and uncertain losses. Participants’ choices were used to estimate risk and ambiguity attitudes in the gain and loss domains. Results Veterans with PTSD were more averse to ambiguity, but not risk, compared to veterans without PTSD, when making choices between possible losses, but not gains. The degree of aversion was associated with anxious arousal (e.g., hypervigilance) symptoms, as well as with the degree of combat exposure. Moreover, ambiguity attitudes fully mediated the association between combat exposure and anxious arousal symptoms. Conclusions These results provide a foundation for prospective studies of the causal association between ambiguity attitudes and trauma-related symptoms, as well as etiologic studies of the neural underpinnings of these behavioral outcomes. More generally, these results demonstrate the potential of neuroeconomic and behavioral economic techniques for devising objective and incentive-compatible diagnostic tools, and investigating the etiology of psychiatric disorders.