Differential impacts of healthy cognitive aging on directed and random exploration.

ABSTRACT: Deciding whether to explore unknown opportunities or exploit well-known options is a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives. Extensive work in college students suggests that young people make explore-exploit decisions using a mixture of information seeking and random behavioral variability. Whether, and to what extent, older adults use the same strategies is unknown. To address this question, 51 older adults (ages 65-74) and 32 younger adults (ages 18-25) completed the Horizon Task, a gambling task that quantifies information seeking and behavioral variability as well as how these strategies are controlled for the purposes of exploration. Qualitatively, we found that older adults performed similar to younger adults on this task, increasing both their information seeking and behavioral varia

SUBMITTER: Mizell JM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10871551 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature