Motivation is a hallmark of healthy aging, but the motivation to engage in effortful behavior diminishes with increasing age. Most neurobiological accounts of altered motivation in older adults assume that these deficits are caused by a gradual decline in brain tissue, while some psychological theories posit a switch from gain orientation to loss avoidance in motivational goals. Here, we contribute to reconcile the psychological and neural perspectives by providing evidence that frontopolar cortex (FPC), a brain region involved in cost-benefit weighting, increasingly underpins effort avoidance rather than engagement with age. Using anodal transcranial direct current stimulation together with effort-reward trade-offs, we find that the FPC’s function in effort-based decisions remains focused on cost-benefit calculations but appears to switch from reward seeking to cost avoidance with increasing age. This is further evidenced by exploratory, independent analysis of structural brain changes, showing that the relationship between the density of frontopolar neural tissue and willingness to exert effort differs in young versus older adults. Our results inform aging-related models of decision making by providing preliminary evidence that, in addition to cortical thinning, changes in goal orientation need to be considered in order to understand alterations in decision making over the lifespan.

Objectives How does risk preference change across the life span? We address this question by conducting a coordinated analysis to obtain the first meta-analytic estimates of adult longitudinal age differences in risk-taking propensity in different domains. Methods We report results from 26 longitudinal samples (12 panels; 187,733 unique respondents; 19 countries) covering general and domain-specific risk-taking propensity (financial, driving, recreational, occupational, health) across three or more waves. Results Results revealed a negative relation between age and both general and domain-specific risk-taking propensity. Furthermore, females consistently reported lower levels of risk taking across the life span than males in all domains but there is little support for the idea of an age by gender interaction. Although we found evidence of systematic and universal age differences, we also detected considerable heterogeneity across domains and samples. Discussion Our work suggests a need to understand the nature of heterogeneity of age differences in risk-taking propensity and recommends the use of domain-specific and population estimates for applications interested in modeling heterogeneity in risk preference for economic and policy-making purposes.

Article (Accepted Version) http://sro.sussex.ac.uk Hole, Graham and Bagaini, Alexandra (2017) The effect of vertical stretching on the extraction of mean identity from faces. This version is available from Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/68803/ This document is made available in accordance with publisher policies and may differ from the published version or from the version of record. If you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the URL above for details on accessing the published version. Copyright and reuse:Sussex Research Online is a digital repository of the research output of the University.Copyright and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable, the material made available in SRO has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full text items generally can be reproduced, displayed or performed and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way.Effect of vertical stretching on the extraction of mean identity from faces: page Observers can extract the mean identity from a set of faces and falsely recognise it as a genuine set member (de Fockert & Wolfenstein, 2009). The current experiment demonstrated that this "perceptual averaging" also occurs with vertically stretched faces. On each trial, participants decided whether a target face was present in a preceding set of four faces. In the control condition, the faces were all normally proportioned; in the stretched set condition, the face sets were stretched but the targets were normal; and in the stretched target condition, the face sets were normal but the targets were stretched. In all three conditions, participants falsely identified the set mean as a face that had been presented within the set, implying that this identity-averaging effect is based on high-level identity information rather than the lowlevel physical characteristics of the face stimuli.

How does risk preference change across the life span? We address this question by conducting a coordinated analysis to obtain the first meta-analytic estimates of adults longitudinal age differences in risk-taking propensity around the world. We report results from 26 longitudinal samples (12 panels; 187,733 unique respondents; 19 countries) covering general and domain-specific risk-taking propensity (financial, driving, recreational, occupational, health) across three or more waves. Results revealed a negative relation between age and both general and domain-specific risk-taking propensity. Females consistently reported lower levels of risk taking across the life span than males in all domains but little support for the idea of an age by gender interaction. Although we found evidence of systematic and universal age differences, we also detected considerable heterogeneity across domains and samples. Our work suggests a need to understand the nature of heterogeneity of age differences in risk-taking propensity and recommends the use of domain-specific and population estimates for applications interested in modeling heterogeneity in risk preference for economic modeling and policy-making.

Objectives Several theories predict changes in individuals’ economic preferences across the life span. To test these theories and provide an historical overview of this literature, we conducted meta-analyses on age differences in risk, time, social, and effort preferences as assessed by behavioral measures. Methods We conducted separate meta-analyses and cumulative meta-analyses on the association between age and risk, time, social, and effort preferences. We also conducted analyses of historical trends in sample sizes and citations patterns for each economic preference. Results The meta-analyses identified overall no significant effects of age for risk (r = -0.02, 95%CI[-0.06, 0.02], n = 39,832), and effort preferences (r = 0.24, 95%CI[-0.05, 0.52], n = 571), but significant effects of age for time (r = -0.04, 95%CI[-0.07, -0.01], n = 115,496) and social preferences (r = 0.11, 95%CI[0.01, 0.21], n = 2,997), suggesting increased patience and altruism with age, respectively. Equivalence tests, that compare these effects to practically important ones (i.e., r = |.1|), however, suggest that all effects are of trivial significance. The analyses of temporal trends suggest that the magnitude of effects and sample sizes have not changed significantly over time, nor do they dramatically affect the extent that articles are cited. Discussion Overall, our results contrast with theories of aging that propose general age effects for risk, and effort preferences, yet provide some but tenuous support for those suggesting age-related changes in time and social preferences. We discuss implications for theory development as well as future empirical work on economic preferences.