carolinephelps.bsky.social
Chronic pain, decision making and memory | Postdoc at Georgia Tech in NRD lab | Tennis player | Loves tea, cake and a good book.
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This work was completed with lots of wonderful people, particularly the PI, Dr. Horizon Task himself, @doctor-bob.bsky.social as well as all the technicians and undergrads in our big author list.
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But this comes at the detriment of less random exploration. Which may be why it's harder to teach an old dog new tricks
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We found that older adults have a lower signal to noise ratio, which could result in more errors.
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.
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Older adults use less random exploration, so how does this happen?
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.
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A good way to look at this is sending our participants to a virtual Vegas, playing a choice of two slot machines in the Horizon Task.
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
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There are two strategies to exploring:
* 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.
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In contrast, exploiting and staying in academia could lead to you publishing exciting preprints, but leave you forever wondering if you could have done well on the Great British Bake Off.
The balance between exploring and exploiting shifts towards less exploration in older people
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We are faced with many 'explore-exploit' decisions throughout our lives. For instance, the eternal postdoc conundrum, do you continue you exploit what you know and continue in academia or explore a new career as a baker?
Exploring a career as a baker could lead to a life making beautiful cakes or..
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Maybe its the same for emeritus professors?!