Age Differences In Intertemporal Choice Domains

As China’s population ages and the supply of the ages’ market booms,the elderly will be faced with a plethora of options.Therefore,more and more researchers have begun to pay attention to the decision-making behavior of the elderly and its processing,to explore whether individuals can still make wise decisions with age,and to think about ways to improve their quality of decision-making.The extent to which a cross-age choice task is related to an individual’s own goals affects his or her decision-making behavior.And as individuals age,the life goals change.The purpose of this study was to explore the mechanisms of aging in intemporal choice from the perspective of goal relevance in the decision-making domain,in conjunction with eye-tracker technology.Study 1 separately measures which transactive choice domains have higher goal relevance for older and younger people.Using psychometric methods,a pool of common decision domains was screened to identify money as a decision domain with high goal relevance for both older and younger people,vegetables as a domain with high goal relevance for older people,computers as a domain with high goal relevance for younger people,and luxury goods as a domain with low goal relevance for both older and younger people.Based on this,Study 2 used a mixed experimental design of 2(age: older/younger)*4(domain goal relevance: money/vegetables/computer/luxury),combined with eyemovement techniques to analyze how the mental processes of older and younger people’s cross-sectional choices differ in the decision domain with different goal relevance.The results found that the discounting rate of vegetables of in old adults do not significantly differ to money,but is less than luxury;young do not have significant differences of the discounting rate among computer,money and luxury As for the eyetracker results,it was found that in terms of depth of processing,older adults had more time and number of looks at distant time in relatively high goal-related domains;younger adults paid more attention in high goal-related domains,except for recent time.In terms of eye-tracker processing order,young people had prior viewing of long-time in terms of benefits,while older people had prior viewing of short-time;young people conducted more time-to-value attention analysis within the same option when it comes to money and vegetables,while older people conducted a comparison between dimensions in almost all domains.This result suggests that the relevance of individual life goals changes with age.Compared to younger individuals,older adults placed much emphasis on vegetables as a health decision domain involving nutritional intake.With the shift in life goals,individuals differ in their performance of decision domains with different goal relevance when making choices across time,with older adults focusing more on temporal information for high goal relevance domains;whereas younger adults pay more attention to high goal relevance,out of recent time,for all regions.The processing style of the elderly group is the result of goal-driven selection,optimization,and compensation.Older individuals have limited resources of their own,but they can optimize the decision information process and compensate to complete the decision by selectively focusing on temporal information in high goalrelated decision areas or value information in low goal-related areas.