Age-related Differences In Decision Making Processing

On any given day,we make plenty of decisions.The ability to identify the best option from a couple of alternatives and adjust one's preferences according to the feedback from the previous choice is critical to make good decisions.While aging causes changes in the brain and cognitive function of older adults,previous research has shown that decision-making,as a complex cognitive process,does not all decline with aging.In other words,changes in decision-making behavior and decreases in the quality of decision-making among older adults depend on the type of tasks and their requirements.Making decisions from options that are complete with information is referred to as description-based decision making.In contrast,decisions where the individual is initially know nothing about the alternatives and needs to obtain information through repeated choices and feedback,are referred to as experience-based decision making.Aging affects the two decision-making tasks differently due to the differences in processing characteristics between the two tasks.Most previous studies have focused on comparing behavioral performance between young and older adults,and the underlying neural mechanisms are not yet precise.In the current study,we aim to explore age-related differences in behavioral performance and related neural mechanisms of description-based and experience-based decision-making.In Study 1,gambling task were adopted to investigate the decision quality,risk preference,and brain activation patterns during description-based decision processing in young and older adults.The results indicated that the quality of decision-making did not decline among older adults and that the amounts of their optimal chose did not significantly differ from that of young adults.The risk preference of older adults is also similar with that of the young adult.In addition,no significant difference in decision-making processing time between young and older adults,suggesting that older adults were not improving their task performance by extending processing time.Task-related brain activation analyses revealed that during decision processing,both older and younger adults showed positive activation in anterior insula,dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,and medial prefrontal cortex,these key brain regions response for the representment and integration of option values.Taken together,these results suggest that older adults had intact ability to deal with description-based decision making.In Study 2,probabilistic learning task was adopted to explore the age-related difference in decision quality and brain activation patterns during experience-based decision processing.Results indicated that older adults choose the optimal option significantly less often than young adults.However,there is no significant age difference in the accuracy of subjective probabilistic estimates between older and young adults.The findings suggest that older adults may use less efficient decision-making strategies.Task-related brain activation analyses showed that during decision processing,all participants showed positive activity in anterior insula,striatum and medial prefrontal cortex.At the same time,older adults showed more positive activity than young adults in the left inferior frontal gyrus,superior parietal gyrus,which may suggest inefficient neural activity in older adults.Study 3 further revealed neural mechanisms of dissimilarity in decision making processes in young and older adults in these two different types of decision-making tasks.We conducted task-related brain activation analyses to compare brain activation patterns of the two tasks directly.We conducted task-related large-scale functional brain network analyses to explore possible age-related differences in the term of connectivity.Conjunction analysis revealed that the bilateral anterior insula and medial prefrontal cortex exhibited consistent activation across decision-making tasks and age groups.Indicate the critical role of these two brain regions in characterizing and assessing the value of the options.No brain regions showed stronger activity during experience-based decision processing than that of experience-based decision making.However,more positive activation was found for processing experience-based decision making the thalamus,striatum,and superior frontal gyrus.Illustrate that experience-based decision-making processing may require the involvement of more regions than description-based decision making.Large-scale functional brain network analysis found that in description-based decision task,older adults showed significantly reduced connectivities within the sensorimotor network,between the ventral attentional network and the visual network in experimental conditions.Whereas during experience-based decision processing,the antagonistic relationship between the dorsal attention network and the default mode network is stronger in older adults.Overall,the experience-based decision making required more brain regions engaged than description-based decision making.Older adults performed comparably to young adults in description-based decision-making and have similar brain activity patterns.Nevertheless,older adults' performance and neural mechanisms are less efficient in experience-based decision-making compared with young adults.This study provides evidence for the variation in decision quality and neural mechanisms in older adults across different task types.Future research needs to explore and compare more fully from the perspective of other decision processes,such as the processing of feedback.