ArticlePsychology and aging2024
Differential impacts of healthy cognitive aging on directed and random exploration.
Article in Psychology and aging, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- The dynamics of explore-exploit decisions suggest a threshold mechanism for reduced random exploration in older adults.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Individual differences in sequential decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Individual differences in information demand have a low dimensional structure predicted by some curiosity traits.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Exploration-Exploitation Mechanisms in Recurrent Neural Networks and Human Learners in Restless Bandit Problems.Computational brain & behavior · 2024Article
- Differential impacts of healthy cognitive aging on directed and random exploration.Psychology and aging · 2024Article
- Enhancing experimental design through Bayes factor design analysis: insights from multi-armed bandit tasks.Wellcome open research · 2024Article
- How does apathy impact exploration-exploitation decision-making in older patients with neurocognitive disorders?npj aging · 2023Article
- Balancing exploration and exploitation with information and randomization.Current opinion in behavioral sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
12 authors.
Funding
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 variability when it was adaptive to explore. Quantitively, however, there were substantial differences between the age groups, with older adults showing less information seeking overall and less reliance on variability as a means to explore. In addition, we found a subset of approximately 26% of older adults whose information seeking was close to zero, avoiding informative options even when they were clearly the better choice. Unsurprisingly, these "information avoiders" performed worse on the task. In contrast, task performance in the remaining "information seeking" older adults was comparable to that of younger adults suggesting that age-related differences in explore-exploit decision making may be adaptive except when they are taken to extremes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).
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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.