When asked to choose between immediate versus future gains, individuals tend to fast-track benefits and, congruently, they tend to delay costs. But, despite the everincreasing importance of the topic, few studies have investigated this behavior among senior citizens. The handful of studies that have been conducted have produced conflicting results and focused on gains as opposed to losses. These conflicting results may in part be due to demographic confounds and the inherent variability that comes with aging. Here, demographic confounds and variability due to aging were minimized by studying three groups: middle-aged, unimpaired older, and impaired older adults.Participants were asked to choose between soonerϪsmaller and laterϪlarger monetary rewards and losses. Results indicated that impaired older adults discounted the future more than unimpaired older adults. Interestingly, middle-aged adults discounted future gains at a similar rate as impaired older adults, but discounted future losses less than impaired older adults (and similarly to unimpaired older adults). This may suggest that unimpaired older adults have developed a compensatory mechanism that leads to more cautious, patient choices. We discuss these results in the context of the neurobiology and neuropsychology of aging and decision-making.

These functional differences may be a consequence of altered reward processing or differing compensatory strategies between IGT-Disadvantageous and -Advantageous older adults. This supports the notion that divergent neurobiological aging trajectories underlie disparate decision-making patterns.

Some healthy older adults show departures from standard decision-making patterns exhibited by younger adults. We asked if such departures are uniform or if heterogeneous aging processes can designate which older adults show differing decision patterns. Thirty-three healthy older adults with varying decision-making patterns on a complex decision task (the Iowa Gambling Task) completed an intertemporal choice task while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging. We examined whether value representation in the canonical valuation network differed across older adults based on complex decision-making ability. Older adults with advantageous decision patterns showed increased activity in the valuation network, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and striatum. In contrast, older adults with disadvantageous decision patterns showed reduced or absent activation in the VMPFC and striatum, and these older adults also showed greater blood oxygen level dependent signal temporal variability in the striatum. Our results suggest that a reduced representation of value in the brain, possibly driven by increased neural noise, relates to suboptimal decision-making in a subset of older adults, which could translate to poor decision-making in many aspects of life, including finance, health and long-term care. Understanding the connection between suboptimal decision-making and neural value signals is a step toward mitigating age-related decision-making impairments.

Older adults are frequently the targets of scams and deception, with millions of individuals being affected each year in the United States alone. Previous research has shown that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) may play a role in vulnerability to fraud. The current study examined brain activation patterns in relation to susceptibility to scams and fraud using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Twenty-eight healthy, community-dwelling older adults were subdivided into groups of impaired and unimpaired decision makers as determined by their performance on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). While in the scanner, the participants viewed advertisements that were created directly from cases deemed deceptive by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). We then obtained behavioral measures involving comprehension of claims and purchase intention of the product in each advertisement. Contrasts show brain activity in the vmPFC was less correlated with purchase intention in impaired vs. unimpaired older adult decision makers. Our results have important implications for both future research and recognizing the possible causes of fraud susceptibility among older adults.

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