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Poster A in Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 4, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms
Age-related differences in structure learning drive foraging behavior in a multimodal patch-leaving task
X Roger Chen1, Meghan P Johnson2, Rohin A. Palsule1, Mackenzie Maxwell1, Nora C. Harhen3, Sharon M Noh1, Ilana J Bennett4, Aaron M Bornstein1; 1University of California, Irvine, 2University of California, San Francisco, 3New York University, 4University of California, Riverside
Presenter: X Roger Chen
Prior work has shown that older adults exhibit reduced exploratory tendencies relative to younger adults. Explanations for this pattern include that older adults' choices are less sensitive to underlying reward values, are simply more “noisy,” or overly sensitive to uncertainty. Recently, the idea that over-exploitation reflects suboptimal choice processes has been called into question by a series of studies that examine how exploration relates to learning environment structure. A prediction that follows from this line of work is that older adult decisions reflect differences in learning and memory, rather than decision strategies. We examined this hypothesis using a sequential patch leaving task with multiple patch types. We fit a computational model that distinguished latent learning from uncertainty-adaptive reward sensitivity. Across 111 participants (53 older, 58 younger), we found that older adults were less likely to overharvest relative to younger adults. Critically, older adult behavior was best explained by a model that lacked sensitivity to latent structure. These findings suggest that age-differences in exploration may be due to an inability to distinguish between options of varying rewards.
Topic Area: Development, Individual Differences & Clinical Populations