Older Adults Forage Broadly for Information Despite Cost
Healthy aging has long been associated with impairments in learning from rewards. However, typical paradigms do not adequately distinguish between being motivated by information to learn about the world and being motivated by rewarding outcomes from our decisions. The present study describes how these distinct motivations guide learning about the environment across the lifespan. Participants…
A recent study examines how older adults and younger individuals approach learning from information versus rewards as they age. The research found that while older adults (ages 18-71) performed worse on a sequential choice task akin to the board game Battleship, their search behavior stabilized earlier than younger participants.
Notably, older adults prioritized gathering information over pursuing rewards, spreading their choices more widely across the grid. They made more choices per trial and acquired more information per trial compared to younger participants. This pattern suggests that as people age, they tend to seek information, which yields fewer points and slows learning but incurs no cost to long-term performance.
Importantly, despite conventional assumptions linking age with diminished learning, older adults remained engaged in the complex environment, where information and rewards were disentangled. The findings challenge the notion that cognitive decline is inevitable in aging and reframe information seeking in older adults as a persistent motivational preference.
This preference to seek information need not serve learning, raising questions about why the drive to seek information intensifies with age, even when it brings no tangible advantage.
Written by urgent.news from bioRxiv's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
