Seizing the Opportunity: Lifespan Differences in the Effects of the Opportunity Cost of Time on Cognitive Control

Abstract

Previous work suggests that lifespan developmental differences in cognitive control reflect maturational and aging-related changes in prefrontal cortex functioning. However, complementary explanations exist: It could be that children and older adults differ from younger adults in how they balance the effort of engaging in control against its potential benefits. Here we test whether the degree of cognitive effort expenditure depends on the opportunity cost of time (average reward rate per unit time): if the average reward rate is high, participants should withhold cognitive effort whereas if it is low, they should invest more. In Experiment 1, we examine this hypothesis in children, adolescents, younger, and older adults, by applying a reward rate manipulation in two cognitive control tasks: a modified Erikson Flanker and a task-switching paradigm. We found that young adults and adolescents reflexively withheld effort when the opportunity cost of time was high, whereas older adults and, to a lesser degree children, invested more resources to accumulate reward as quickly as possible. We tentatively interpret these results in terms of age- and task-specific differences in the processing of the opportunity cost of time. We qualify our findings in a second experiment in younger adults in which we address an alternative explanation of our results and show that the observed age differences in effort expenditure may not result from differences in task difficulty. To conclude, we think that our results present an interesting first step at relating opportunity costs to motivational processes across the lifespan. We frame the implications of further work in this area within a recent developmental model of resource-rationality, which points to developmental sweet spots in cognitive control.

Dissociable influences of reward and punishment on adaptive cognitive control

“…While this assumption was reasonable given the parameters of our task (i.e., where incentives were explicitly cued and pseudorandomized), a crucial next step will be to examine how people dynamically reconfigure control as they learn from feedback that the expected rewards and penalties in their environment are changing. Research has shown that people dynamically adjust their response threshold in both decision-making tasks [56] and cognitive control tasks [30,57] as they learn to expect greater rewards. It remains to be tested how these cognitive control adjustments are distributed across both threshold and drift rate with changes in both reward and punishment, as well as with individualspecific [58,59] and context-specific [60] differences in learning from these positive and negative outcomes.…”

Strategic social decision making undergoes significant changes in typically developing and autistic early adolescents

“…Previous studies have found social cognition to be more effortful for preadolescent children and more reliant on executive functioning and general reasoning skills compared to adolescent and adult samples ( Devine & Hughes, 2013;Dumontheil, Apperly, & Blakemore, 2010). One study, specifically, found that children's social and reward decisions relied on more cognitive resources, compared to those of older age groups (Devine et al, 2021). This may be due to a critical stage in brain reorganization supporting cognitive skills in both TD and autistic preadolescent children.…”