Age differences in risky choice: a meta‐analysis

Mata, Rui; Josef, Anika K.; Samanez-Larkin, Gregory R.; Hertwig, Ralph

doi:10.1111/j.1749-6632.2011.06200.x

Cited by 372 publications

(508 citation statements)

References 67 publications

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“…Early in the task, the elderly group wagered significantly more on average (1.62 +/-.39) in the first 10 rounds (30 trials) than the young (1.26 +/-.51) adult group, t(44.69) = 2.7153, p = .008, suggesting that young adults learned to make more HR investments whereas elderly adults learned to make more LR investments. This is consistent with prior research demonstrating that the elderly are not necessarily characterized by preferences for either high or low risk (Lim & Yu, 2015;Mata, Josef, Samanez-Larkin, & Hertwig, 2011). …”

Section: Ssit Performance: Earnings and Choicessupporting

confidence: 91%

Altered behavioral and neural responsiveness to counterfactual gains in the elderly

Tobia

Guo

Gläscher

et al. 2016

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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Counterfactual information processing refers to the consideration of events that did not occur in comparison to those actually experienced, in order to determine optimal actions, and can be formulated as computational learning signals, referred to as fictive prediction errors. Decision making and the neural circuitry for counterfactual processing are altered in healthy elderly adults. This experiment investigated age differences in neural systems for decision making with knowledge of counterfactual outcomes. Two groups of healthy adult participants, young (N = 30; ages 19-30 years) and elderly (N = 19; ages 65-80 years), were scanned with fMRI during 240 trials of a strategic sequential investment task in which a particular strategy of differentially weighting counterfactual gains and losses during valuation is associated with more optimal performance. Elderly participants earned significantly less than young adults, differently weighted counterfactual consequences and exploited task knowledge, and exhibited altered activity in a fronto-striatal circuit while making choices, compared to young adults. The degree to which task knowledge was exploited was positively correlated with modulation of neural activity by expected value in the vmPFC for young adults, but not in the elderly. These findings demonstrate that elderly participants' poor task performance may be related to different counterfactual processing.

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Section: Ssit Performance: Earnings and Choicessupporting

confidence: 91%

Altered behavioral and neural responsiveness to counterfactual gains in the elderly

Tobia

Guo

Gläscher

et al. 2016

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…In ambiguous situations, these probabilities are either partially or completely unknown. Oddly enough, the studies available to date that have examined age-related differences in decision making under uncertainty have either focused on risk alone or have used tasks that convolve risk and ambiguity in an inseparable manner (21). It is in part this separation of the constituent processes of decision making that allows for several of the unique conclusions presented here.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Like cognitive function, decision making across the life span shows profound age-related changes

Tymula

Belmaker²,

Ruderman³

et al. 2013

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

258

278

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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.

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“…But very often, researchers rely on a socalled weak definition of risk attitude (Pratt, 1964), which is based on individuals' preferences towards the presence versus absence of risk, instantiated by a lottery and its expected value, respectively. In this paper, we aim to show that adopting an alternative definition can have important implications for understanding common patterns of results that have been the target of considerable research, such as the reflection effect (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979) or individual and age differences in risky choice (Best & Charness, 2015;Mata et al, 2011). More specifically, the goal of the present paper is to argue for a wider use of a strong definition of risk, which focuses on attitudes towards degrees of risk.…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

Individual classification of strong risk attitudes: An application across lottery types and age groups

2017

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Empirical evaluations of risk attitudes often rely on a weak definition of risk that concerns preferences towards risky and riskless options (e.g., a lottery vs. a sure outcome). A large body of work has shown that individuals tend to be weak risk averse in choice contexts involving risky and riskless gains but weak risk seeking in contexts involving losses, a phenomenon known as the reflection effect. Recent attempts to evaluate age differences in risk attitudes have relied on this weak definition, testing whether the reflection effect increases or diminishes as we grow older. The present work argues that weak risk attitudes have limited generalizability and proposes the use of a strong definition of risk that is concerned with preferences towards options with the same expected value but different degrees of risk (i.e., outcome variance). A reanalysis of previouslypublished data and the results from a new study show that only a minority of individuals manifests the reflection effect under a strong definition of risk, and that, when facing certain lottery-pair types, older adults appear to be more risk seeking than younger adults.

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Age differences in risky choice: a meta‐analysis

Cited by 372 publications

References 67 publications

Altered behavioral and neural responsiveness to counterfactual gains in the elderly

Altered behavioral and neural responsiveness to counterfactual gains in the elderly

Like cognitive function, decision making across the life span shows profound age-related changes

Individual classification of strong risk attitudes: An application across lottery types and age groups

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