Are you feeling stuck in your ways? Less excited about exploring anything new? You may be aging!
Read on for insight into why your decision making is changing.
Read on for insight into why your decision making is changing.
Reposted from
bioRxiv Neuroscience
The dynamics of explore-exploit decisions suggest a threshold mechanism for reduced random exploration in older adults https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.02.13.638023v1
Comments
Exploring a career as a baker could lead to a life making beautiful cakes or..
The balance between exploring and exploiting shifts towards less exploration in older people
* Directed exploration is an explicit bias towards choosing more informative options.
* Random exploration- a ‘noisy’ choice selection, where choices are less obviously tied to the value of options.
In which the amount of info they receive about both slot machines varies as well as how long they have to use that info - so how advantageous it is to explore
We focus on the drift diffusion model, where evidence for a decision is noisily accumulated over time, until it passes the threshold for one option or the other.
BUT older adults also had a higher threshold for decision making.
Potentially this is a healthy aging adaption which helps to reduce errors, as older adults outperformed younger adults.