ArticleJournal of experimental psychology. General2016
Exploratory decision-making as a function of lifelong experience, not cognitive decline.
Article in Journal of experimental psychology. General, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
18 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Are older adults more risky readers? Evidence from meta-analysis.Psychology and aging · 2022Pooled it
- Structure-function dynamics in healthy cognitive aging: a graph signal processing approach.Brain structure & function · 2026Article
- MEG state dynamics of sentence generation: evidence for a compensatory segmentation mechanism in healthy aging.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Pilot Study on Risk Perception in Practices with Medical Cyclotrons in Radiopharmaceutical Centers in Latin American Countries: Diagnosis and Corrective Measures.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2025Article
- Meta-Analysis Reveals That Explore-Exploit Decisions are Dissociable by Activation in the Dorsal Lateral Prefrontal Cortex, Anterior Insula, and the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Lifespan oscillatory dynamics in lexical production: A population-based MEG resting-state analysis.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Participants' Utilitarian Choice Is Influenced by Gamble Presentation and Age.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Developmental changes in exploration resemble stochastic optimization.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Autobiographical event memory and aging: older adults get the gist.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2022Review
- From exploration to exploitation: a shifting mental mode in late life development.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2021Review
- Risk Perception and Coping Behavior of Construction Workers on Occupational Health Risks-A Case Study of Nanjing, China.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2021Article
- Semantic diversity in paired-associate learning: Further evidence for the information accumulation perspective of cognitive aging.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2020Article
- Effects of Normative Aging on Eye Movements during Reading.Vision (Basel, Switzerland) · 2020Review
- Neural Correlates of Enhanced Memory for Meaningful Associations with Age.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2019Article
- Emotional arousal may increase susceptibility to fraud in older and younger adults.Psychology and aging · 2018Article
- Framing matters: Effects of framing on older adults' exploratory decision-making.Psychology and aging · 2017Article
- Prior Knowledge of Object Associations Shapes Attentional Templates and Information Acquisition.Frontiers in psychology · 2017Review
- A Lifespan Perspective on Embodied Cognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Older adults perform worse than younger adults in some complex decision-making scenarios, which is commonly attributed to age-related declines in striatal and frontostriatal processing. Recently, this popular account has been challenged by work that considered how older adults' performance may differ as a function of greater knowledge and experience, and by work showing that, in some cases, older adults outperform younger adults in complex decision-making tasks. In light of this controversy, we examined the performance of older and younger adults in an exploratory choice task that is amenable to model-based analyses and ostensibly not reliant on prior knowledge. Exploration is a critical aspect of decision-making poorly understood across the life span. Across 2 experiments, we addressed (a) how older and younger adults differ in exploratory choice and (b) to what extent observed differences reflect processing capacity declines. Model-based analyses suggested that the strategies used by the 2 groups were qualitatively different, resulting in relatively worse performance for older adults in 1 decision-making environment but equal performance in another. Little evidence was found that differences in processing capacity drove performance differences. Rather the results suggested that older adults' performance might result from applying a strategy that may have been shaped by their wealth of real-word decision-making experience. While this strategy is likely to be effective in the real world, it is ill suited to some decision environments. These results underscore the importance of taking into account effects of experience in aging studies, even for tasks that do not obviously tap past experiences.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.