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Wouter van den Bos

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RLDM Conference 2017 Conference Abstract

Aging of the Exploring Mind: Older Adults Deviate more from Optimality in Complex Choice

  • Job Schepens
  • Ralph Hertwig
  • Wouter van den Bos

Older adults (OA) need to make many important and difficult decisions. Often, there are too many options available to explore exhaustively, creating the ubiquitous tradeoff between exploration and exploita- tion. How do OA make these complex tradeoffs? OA may generally more often rely on model-free than model-based reinforcement learning. Such computational changes have been associated with age-related changes in cortico-striatal control loop functioning. Here, we investigated age-related shifts in solving exploration-exploitation tradeoffs depending on the complexity of the choice environment. Older (N = 32, mean age = 70. 47) and younger adults (N = 29, mean age = 24. 31) played four and eight option N-armed bandit problems with the numbers of current gambles and average rewards displayed on the screen. This minimized the role of working memory and allowed us to focus on how OA learn to seek knowledge effec- tively. This is a relevant issue in studies of continually learning artificial agents as well. OA reliably chose the most rewarding options less often than younger adults (YA) did. In addition, choices of OA were more deviant from an optimality model (Thompson sampling). This optimality model tracks uncertainty beyond simple action values or only the last choice. We further measured structural connectivity in cortico-striatal loops using diffusion weighted MRI (pending analyses). Together, OA seem to process uncertainty that is associated with options in more complex choice environments sub-optimally, suggesting more limited task representations. This interpretation fits to multiple contexts in the complex cognitive aging literature, and in particular to the context of challenges in the maintenance of goal-directed learning. Such changes may result from constraints of biological aging as well as the cognitive processes of continuous information selection and abstraction needed for building new knowledge on existing knowledge over the life-span.

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