Age-related within-task adaptations in sequential decision making: Considering cognitive and motivational factors.

Abstract

Many decisions require sequentially searching through the available alternatives. In these tasks, older adults have been shown to perform worse than younger adults, but the reasons why age differences occur are still unclear. In the present research, we tackle this question by investigating which strategies older and younger adults adopt and how these strategies relate to individual differences in cognitive (mental speed, working memory capacity) and motivational (need for cognitive closure) variables. To achieve this goal, we conducted two studies in which older and younger adults performed a computerized sequential choice task. Study 1 indicated that older adults changed their decision-making strategies throughout the task by reducing the number of options they considered. This change in strategy did not decrease performance because searching less allowed older adults to choose more promising options. In the second study we manipulated whether a long or short search was optimal. In the beginning older adults performed worse than younger adults independent of whether short or long search was adaptive. However, in the second half of the task we found age differences in performance when long search was required, but not when short search was required. In both studies whether or not older adults changed their strategy depended on their need for cognitive closure, suggesting that avoiding cognitive closure facilitates adaptive flexibility. Together, the two studies provide evidence for compensatory strategy adaptations among older adults completing sequential choice tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record

Cognitive and Neuroanatomic Accounts of Referential Communication in Focal Dementia

“…This pattern suggests that healthy control subjects acted strategically and used the condition information to eliminate incorrect options using color terms (and thereby increased the chance of a precise response). Such an explanation aligns well with the previous literature showing that older adults tend to show an increased use of heuristics when problem solving compared with younger adults, who rely more on on-line analytical reasoning (Johnson, 1990; Klaczynski and Robinson, 2000; Kim and Hasher, 2005; Worthy and Maddox, 2012; Rydzewska et al, 2018). For example, using a computer-based sequential choice task, Rydzewska et al (2018) found that older adults adopt compensatory strategies during complex decision-making tasks and reduce the number of options they consider over time, without sacrificing performance.…”

Age differences in hindsight bias: A meta-analysis.

“…For example, Horn et al (2015) found that in an inference task that recruits general knowledge and recognition memory, older adults seemed to overrely on a simple heuristic relative to young adults (see also Pachur, Mata, & Schooler, 2009). Rydzewska, von Helversen, Kossowska, Magnuski, and Sedek (2018; Exp. 1) showed that young and older adults, though performing comparably in a sequential decision-making task, differed in the underlying search strategy.…”

Adaptive behavior in optimal sequential search.

“…In turn, decision models that involve such computational steps assume processes that appear to be intractable and implausible for a human decision maker (e.g., Bossaerts & Murawski, 2017; Cooper, 1990; Gershman et al, 2015; Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier, 2011; Simon, 1955; Todd et al, 2012). Moreover, several studies investigating human search in related search tasks have shown that corresponding models were not able to accommodate behavioral characteristics, leading to inferior model fits compared with heuristic choice rules (e.g., Baumann et al, 2020; Hey, 1982; Kahan et al, 1967; Rydzewska et al, 2018; Sang et al, 2020; Song et al, 2019). In turn, these researchers argued that humans adopt heuristic decision rules rather than calculating optimal outcome probabilities.…”