Novelty-seeking and directed exploration scale with dissociable social network outcomes and brain systems in older adults

Social isolation and loneliness pose significant challenges to older adults' well-being. Shrinking social networks and age-related shifts in behavior and decision-making may heighten vulnerability to loneliness. These changes in social decision-making can be understood through an exploration-exploitation tradeoff framework, prioritizing known social options over uncertain ones.

However, no study has examined how complementary decision-making strategies, undirected novelty seeking and goal-directed exploration, connect to social network factors or are supported by unique neural systems. Undirected novelty seeking is fueled by the intrinsic appeal of novel options, irrespective of anticipated information gain, while goal-directed exploration involves deliberately sampling uncertain options to minimize uncertainty and optimize future choices.

To investigate these concepts, researchers employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a novel social bandit reinforcement task. The findings revealed that undirected novelty seeking correlated with social network size and activity in temporoparietal and mid-cingulate brain regions. Goal-directed exploration, on the other hand, was linked to subjective feelings of social connectedness and activity in anterior cingulate and prefrontal brain areas.

Importantly, choice probabilities from a non-social version of the three-arm bandit task did not correlate with social decision-making or social constructs. The study concludes that in later life, dissociable social decision-making strategies, when confronted with unknown options, rely on distinct neural systems that support social network size and subjective feelings of social connectedness.