Learning to choose: Cognitive aging and strategy selection learning in decision making.

Decision makers often have to learn from experience. In these situations, people must use the available feedback to select the appropriate decision strategy. How does the ability to select decision strategies on the basis of experience change with age? We examined younger and older adults' strategy selection learning in a probabilistic inference task using a computational model of strategy selection learning. Older adults showed poorer decision performance compared with younger adults. In particular, older adults performed poorly in an environment favoring the use of a more cognitively demanding strategy. The results suggest that the impact of cognitive aging on strategy selection learning depends on the structure of the decision environment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The aging decision maker: Cognitive aging and the adaptive selection of decision strategies.

Are older adults' decision abilities fundamentally compromised by age-related cognitive decline? Or can they adaptively select decision strategies? One study (N = 163) investigated the impact of cognitive aging on the ability to select decision strategies as a function of environment structure. Participants made decisions in either an environment that favored the use of information-intensive strategies or one favoring the use of simple, information-frugal strategies. Older adults tended to (a) look up less information and take longer to process it and (b) use simpler, less cognitively demanding strategies. In accordance with the idea that age-related cognitive decline leads to reliance on simpler strategies, measures of fluid intelligence explained age-related differences in information search and strategy selection. Nevertheless, both young and older adults seem to be equally adapted decision makers in that they adjust their information search and strategy selection as a function of environment structure, suggesting that the aging decision maker is an adaptive one. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in choice satisfaction: A positivity effect in decision making.

The authors tested the possibility that older adults show a positivity effect in decision making, by giving younger and older adults the opportunity to choose 1 of 4 products and by examining the participants' satisfaction with their choice. The authors considered whether requiring participants to explicitly evaluate the options before making a choice has an effect on age differences in choice satisfaction. Older adults in the evaluation condition listed more positive and fewer negative attributes than did younger adults and were more satisfied with their decisions than were younger adults. There were no age differences among those who did not evaluate options. This evaluation-dependent elevation of satisfaction among older adults was still present when participants were contacted 2 weeks after the experiment. Age did not influence the accuracy with which participants predicted how their satisfaction would change over time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive aging and the adaptive use of recognition in decision making.

The recognition heuristic, which predicts that a recognized object scores higher on some criterion than an unrecognized one, is a simple inference strategy and thus an attractive mental tool for making inferences with limited cognitive resources—for instance, in old age. In spite of its simplicity, the recognition heuristic might be negatively affected in old age by too much knowledge, inaccurate memory, or deficits in its adaptive use. Across 2 studies, we investigated the impact of cognitive aging on the applicability, accuracy, and adaptive use of the recognition heuristic. Our results show that (a) young and old adults’ recognition knowledge was an equally useful cue for making inferences about the world; (b) as with young adults, old adults adjusted their use of the recognition heuristic between environments with high and low recognition validities; and (c) old adults, however, showed constraints in their ability to adaptively suspend the recognition heuristic on specific items. Measures of fluid intelligence mediated these age-related constraints. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Threat and selective exposure: The moderating role of threat and decision context on confirmatory information search after decisions.

Previous studies on the impact of perceived threat on confirmatory information search (selective exposure) in the context of decision making have yielded mixed results. Some studies have suggested that confirmatory information search is reduced, yet others have found contradictory effects. The present series of 5 studies consistently found that the crucial moderator for these inconsistent findings was whether the induced threat was contextually related to the subsequent decision and information search tasks. Contextual incongruence (e.g., an induction of terrorist threat followed by an economic decision case) results in reduced levels of confirmatory information search, whereas a congruent threat (e.g., an induction of terrorist threat followed by a decision case on terrorism) results in increased levels of confirmatory information search. Analyses of the underlying psychological processes revealed that decision-unrelated threat inductions increase decision makers' experienced decision uncertainty, thus reducing confirmatory information search. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When less is not always more: Stereotype knowledge and reasoning development.

Developmental studies on heuristics and biases have reported controversial findings suggesting that children sometimes reason more logically than do adults. We addressed the controversy by testing the impact of children's knowledge of the heuristic stereotypes that are typically cued in these studies. Five-year-old preschoolers and 8-year-old children were tested with a card game version of the classic base-rate task. Problems were based on stereotypes that were familiar or unfamiliar for preschoolers. We also manipulated whether the cued stereotypical response was consistent (no-conflict problems) or inconsistent (conflict problems) with the correct analytic response that was cued in the problem. Results showed that an age-related performance decrease on the conflict problems was accompanied by an age-related performance increase on the no-conflict problems. These age effects were most pronounced for problems that adopted stereotypes that were unfamiliar for the 5-year-old preschoolers. When preschoolers were familiar with the stereotypes, their performance also started being affected. Findings support the claim that previously reported age-related performance decreases on classic reasoning tasks need to be attributed to the increased need to deal with tempting heuristics and not to a decrease in analytic thinking skills per se. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age differences in the effects of conscious and unconscious thought in decision making.

The roles of unconscious and conscious thought in decision making were investigated to examine both (a) boundary conditions associated with the efficacy of each type of thought and (b) age differences in intuitive versus deliberative thought. Participants were presented with 2 decision tasks, one requiring active deliberation and the other intuitive processing. Young and older adults then engaged in conscious or unconscious thought processing before making a decision. A manipulation check revealed that young adults were more accurate in their representations of the decision material than older adults, which accounted for much of the age-related variation in performance when the full sample was considered. When only accurate participants were considered, decision making was best when there was congruence between the nature of the information and the thought condition. Thus, unconscious thought was more appropriate when participants relied on intuitive rather than deliberative processing to make their decision, whereas the converse was true with conscious thought. Although older adults displayed somewhat less efficient deliberative processing, their ability to process information at the intuitive level was relatively preserved. Additionally, both young and older adults displayed choice-supportive memory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

No age differences in complex memory search: Older adults search as efficiently as younger adults.

In 2 experiments, the authors investigated age differences in memory search under 4 conditions: forward search, backward search, random search, and fixed irregular search. Both search slopes and serial position curves were investigated. Mixing conditions led to smaller age differences than blocking conditions, suggesting that younger adults have an advantage over older adults when strategies can be applied to memory scanning. All age differences in scanning rates, however, disappeared when age differences in a magnitude-judgment control task were controlled for, showing that age differences in memory scanning tasks are not because of the scanning process per se, but because of attention, sensorimotor speed, and decision processes. In both experiments, the serial position curves of older adults echoed those of younger adults closely, demonstrating that younger and older adults use the same scanning processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

To achieve or not to achieve: A self-regulation perspective on adolescents' academic decision making.

In 2 studies, the authors investigated the utility of the self-regulation model of decision making for explaining and predicting adolescents' academic decision making. Participants were mostly 9th and 11th graders. The 1st study consisted of all boys, and a 2nd similar study consisted of boys and girls. Measures included a newly developed assessment of decision-making skill (the Decision-Making-Competency Inventory), select scales of the Learning and Study Strategies Inventory-High School Version, an assessment of the importance of academic goals, and teacher ratings of achievement behavior. Adolescents' valuing of academic goals and their decision-making competency were typically the best predictors of their achievement behavior. Older adolescent boys did not affirm achievement striving compared with younger adolescent boys and older adolescent girls. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ethnic diversity and distributed information in group decision making: The importance of information elaboration.

Ethnic diversity may impede groups' use of distributed information in decision making. This is not so much because diversity interferes with groups' ability to reach agreement, but because ethnic diversity may disrupt the elaboration (exchange and integration) of distributed information. The authors find evidence for this proposition in an experiment (N = 63 groups) in which ethnically diverse groups are shown to benefit more from instructions emphasizing information integration than ethnically homogeneous groups when dealing with distributed information, whereas neither ethnic diversity nor information integration instruction affected decision making performance in groups with fully shared information. These effects were mediated by a behavioral measure of group information elaboration. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Taking the easy way out: Preference diversity, decision strategies, and decision refusal in groups.

It has often been argued and found that preference diversity is beneficial for the quality of group decisions. However, this literature has neglected the fact that in many situations, it is also possible not to choose. Further, preference diversity can be based on attractions, aversions, or both. The authors argue that some types of preference diversity can lead to biased discussions and choice refusal (i.e., the group refuses to choose any of the available options). In a laboratory experiment, three different patterns were observed. When group members held different aversions before discussion, discussions were aversion driven and group members quickly agreed to refuse all alternatives. When each alternative had both a proponent and an adversary, discussions were longer and unbiased but still often led to refusal, which was accompanied by relatively low levels of outcome satisfaction. Only when preference diversity was based only on attractions did it lead to unbiased discussion, low prevalence of refusal, and high outcome satisfaction. Implications for group decision making are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Processing speed and memory mediate age-related differences in decision making.

Decision making under risk changes with age. Increases in risk aversion with age have been most commonly characterized, although older adults may be risk seeking in some decision contexts. An important, and unanswered, question is whether these changes in decision making reflect a direct effect of aging or, alternatively, an indirect effect caused by age-related changes in specific cognitive processes. In the current study, older adults (M = 71 years) and younger adults (M = 24 years) completed a battery of tests of cognitive capacities and decision-making preferences. The results indicated systematic effects of age upon decision quality—with both increased risk seeking and increased risk aversion observed in different tasks—consistent with prior studies. Path analyses, however, revealed that age-related effects were mediated by individual differences in processing speed and memory. When those variables were included in the model, age was no longer a significant predictor of decision quality. The authors conclude that the reduction in decision quality and associated changes in risk preferences commonly ascribed to aging are instead mediated by age-related changes in underlying cognitive capacities. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Use and evaluation of discrete test information in decision making.

Elementary decision theory is applied to the problems of evaluating discrete tests or test items used to classify people into several categories, and choosing which of several treatments is best for persons falling within each response category. The technique explicitly considers the base rates of various criterion groups and the relative seriousness of different types of errors of classification, as well as the proportion of each criterion group falling in each response category. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When values of different cultures conflict: Ethical decision making in a multicultural context.

Can psychologists apply the same standards of moral conduct when treating patients from diverse cultural backgrounds as they do when treating European-American patients? The authors recommend options to exercise when patients from diverse backgrounds engage in behaviors that violate generally accepted Western standards of conduct. Psychologists need to determine if such a cultural conflict really exists, as many such conflicts are more apparent than real. If such a conflict does exist, the authors recommend analyzing the conflict from the perspective of soft universalism, which holds that all cultures share basic, universal values, although they may vary in how those values are expressed. The authors recommend a decision-making process based on principle-based ethics for guiding behavior when such conflicts occur. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age-related changes in selective attention and perceptual load during visual search.

Three visual search experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that age differences in selective attention vary as a function of perceptual load (E. A. Maylor & N. Lavie, 1998). Under resource-limited conditions (Experiments 1 and 2), the distraction from irrelevant display items generally decreased as display size (perceptual load) increased. This perceptual load effect was similar for younger and older adults, contrary to the findings of Maylor and Lavie. Distraction at low perceptual loads appeared to reflect both general and specific inhibitory mechanisms. Under more data-limited conditions (Experiment 3), an age-related decline in selective attention was evident, but the age difference was not attributable to capacity limitations as predicted by the perceptual load theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affective and deliberative processes in risky choice: Age differences in risk taking in the Columbia Card Task.

The authors investigated risk taking and underlying information use in 13- to 16- and 17- to 19-year-old adolescents and in adults in 4 experiments, using a novel dynamic risk-taking task, the Columbia Card Task (CCT). The authors investigated risk taking under differential involvement of affective versus deliberative processes with 2 versions of the CCT, constituting the most direct test of a dual-system explanation of adolescent risk taking in the literature so far. The “hot” CCT was designed to trigger more affective decision making, whereas the “cold” CCT was designed to trigger more deliberative decision making. Differential involvement of affective versus deliberative processes in the 2 CCT versions was established by self-reports and assessment of electrodermal activity. Increased adolescent risk taking, coupled with simplified information use, was found in the hot but not the cold condition. Need-for-arousal predicted risk taking only in the hot condition, whereas executive functions predicted information use in the cold condition. Results are consistent with recent dual-system explanations of risk taking as the result of competition between affective processes and deliberative cognitive-control processes, with adolescents’ affective system tending to override the deliberative system in states of heightened emotional arousal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Some effects of information, situation, and personality on decision making in a clinical setting.

40 graduate students were used as Ss to investigate some relationships among informational, situational, and personality variables and to observe the effects of these variables on various aspects of interpretive decision behavior. The major finding was that high-anal Ss (on the Dynamic Personality Inventory) have less confidence in their interpretations, make fewer specific predictions, and find less pathology in their patients than low-anal Ss. This finding confirms some aspects of the psychoanalytic view of personality and points out that clinical decisions are not independent of the clinician's personality. The effects of ego involvement and different conditions of information on clinical decision making were also investigated. Clear-cut implications about these variables cannot be derived from this study, although some suggestions about the relationship of ego involvement to personality and defense are offered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Examining age differences in performance of a complex information search and retrieval task.

This study examined age differences in performance of a complex information search and retrieval task by using a simulated real-world task typical of those performed by customer service representatives. The study also investigated the influence of task experience and the relationships between cognitive abilities and task performance. One hundred seventeen participants from 3 age groups, younger (20–39 years), middle-aged (40–59 years), and older (60–75 years), performed the task for 3 days. Significant age differences were found for all measures of task performance with the exception of navigational efficiency and number of problems correctly navigated per attempt. There were also effects of task experience. The findings also indicated significant direct and indirect relations between component cognitive abilities and task performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

A comparative analysis of the categorization of multidimensional stimuli: II. Strategic information search in humans (Homo sapiens) but not in pigeons (Columba livia).

Pigeons and undergraduates learned conditional discriminations involving multiple spatially separated stimulus dimensions. Under some conditions, the dimensions were made available sequentially. In 3 experiments, the dimensions were all perfectly valid predictors of the response that would be reinforced and mutually redundant; in 2 others, they varied in validity. In tests with stimuli in which 1 of the 3 dimensions took an anomalous value, most but not all individuals of both species categorized them in terms of single dimensions. When information was delivered as a function of the passage of time, some students, but no pigeons, waited for the most useful information, especially when the cues differed in objective validity. When the subjects could control information delivery, both species obtained information selectively. When cue validities varied, almost all students tended to choose the most valid cues, and when all cues were valid, some chose the cues by which they classified test stimuli. Only a few pigeons chose the most useful information in either situation. Despite their tendency to unidimensional categorization, the pigeons showed no evidence of rule-governed behavior, but students followed a simple “take-the-best” rule. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Group decision making in hidden profile situations: Dissent as a facilitator for decision quality.

The effect of diversity in individual prediscussion preferences on group decision quality was examined in an experiment in which 135 three-person groups worked on a personnel selection case with 4 alternatives. The information distribution among group members constituted a hidden profile (i.e., the correct solution was not identifiable on the basis of the members' individual information and could be detected only by pooling and integrating the members' unique information). Whereas groups with homogeneous suboptimal prediscussion preferences (no dissent) hardly ever solved the hidden profile, solution rates were significantly higher in groups with prediscussion dissent, even if none of these individual prediscussion preferences were correct. If dissent came from a proponent of the correct solution, solution rates were even higher than in dissent groups without such a proponent. The magnitude of dissent (i.e., minority dissent or full diversity of individual preferences) did not affect decision quality. The beneficial effect of dissent on group decision quality was mediated primarily by greater discussion intensity and to some extent also by less discussion bias in dissent groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)