Speakers
Overview
Our three speakers presented on how decision-making develops and changes from infancy through to older adulthood, with work focusing on different stages of the lifespan. One talk examined reversal learning in babies as young as nine and eleven months, using looking time and anticipatory saccades as behavioural proxies to show that individual differences in tracking and adapting to environmental change are already detectable in the first year of life. A second talk focused on how testosterone shapes emotional control circuits during adolescence, revealing an inverted U-shaped developmental trajectory, and showing that early life stress can in fact accelerate this neuroendocrine shift. A third talk investigated how younger and older adults differ in their exploration-exploitation trade-offs in a visual foraging task, finding that the direction of age differences depends on what cognitive load the task imposes.
Key Points
Already at 11 months, babies show individual differences in reversal sensitivity which closely resemble the computational signatures of impaired decision-making seen in adults with ADHD, anxiety, and psychopathic traits.
Testosterone plays a dual role across development: during adolescence it drives neural reorganisation and predicts more prefrontal recruitment for emotional control, while in adulthood higher testosterone is associated with less recruitment of the same region; this shows an inverted U that has now been replicated longitudinally from age twelve to twenty.
Early life stress, including prenatal stress, seems to speed-up this neuroendocrine trajectory, maybe closing the flexible developmental window sooner than would be optimal and by doing so, increasing vulnerability to affective disorders.
Older adults show an exploitation bias in visual foraging under memory load, leaving patches later and collecting more items despite diminishing returns, but under attentional load, age differences in optimality largely disappear, suggesting the task context shapes the trade-off as much as age itself.
Cross-lifespan comparison requires major adaptions in experimental paradigms.
Open question: To what extent do age-related differences in explore-exploit behaviour reflect genuine cognitive decline versus shifts in preferences, values, risk tolerance, or motivation?
Next Steps
Possible collaborations: combining developmental paradigms across infant, adolescent, and older adult samples to build a lifespan picture of adaptive decision-making, and linking neuroendocrine trajectories with computational models of learning and control.
If you are interested in lifespan decision-making and would like to connect with the speakers or suggest a speaker for another session, contact us at centerfordecisionscience@ru.nl.