Humans learn not only from their own experiences but also by observing others. Prior research has shown that reward prediction errors (RPEs) - the difference between expected and received outcomes - guide both experiential and observational reinforcement learning. While RPEs from direct experience have been linked to memory formation, it remains unclear whether vicarious RPEs play a similar role in observational learning. Using an incidental memory paradigm, we investigated how experiential and observational learning in a decision-making task shape memory and examined the role of RPEs in this process. Although recognition accuracy did not differ between learning conditions, participants reported higher confidence in memories from experiential trials. Notably, across both learning conditions, gambling and positive RPEs during memory item presentation were associated with enhanced memory. These findings advance our understanding of how observing others' choices and outcomes affects episodic memory by emphasizing shared encoding mechanisms with experiential learning.

The prevalence-induced concept change (PICC) effect demonstrates the malleability of people’s mental concepts, as they can change due to mere shifts in the prevalence of events in the environment. People differ in their sensitivity to the PICC effect. We hypothesised that variability in the PICC effect might reflect the level of confidence with which judgements about concepts are made. That is, the more confident people are in their original concepts, the less likely they are to adapt their concepts to changes in the environment. In a preregistered study (N = 81), we found that confidence indeed modulates the PICC effect, but in a way opposite to our prediction. Higher self-reported confidence before the prevalence shift is associated with a higher probability of changing concepts after the prevalence shift. We used the decision boundary parameter from the drift-diffusion modelling approach as an alternative measure of confidence and found the same pattern of results. We argue that in complex environments, where people do not explicitly process changes, higher confidence triggers an intuitive decision strategy and makes people more sensitive to the external environmental cues, while lower confidence leads to more deliberate choices and sticking to the old concepts.

Learning accurate beliefs about the world is computationally demanding but critical for adaptive behavior across the lifespan. Here, we build on an established framework formalizing learning as predictive inference and examine the possibility that age differences in learning emerge from efficient computations that consider available cognitive resources differing across the lifespan. In our resource-rational model, beliefs are updated through a sampling process that stops after reaching a criterion level of accuracy. The sampling process navigates a trade-off between belief accuracy and computational cost, with more samples favoring belief accuracy and fewer samples minimizing costs. When cognitive resources are limited or costly, a maximization of the accuracy-cost ratio requires a more frugal sampling policy, which leads to systematically biased beliefs. Data from two lifespan studies (N = 129 and N = 90) and one study in younger adults (N = 94) show that children and older adults display biases characteristic of a more frugal sampling policy. This is reflected in (a) more frequent perseveration when participants are required to update from previous beliefs and (b) a stronger anchoring bias when updating beliefs from an externally generated value. These results are qualitatively consistent with simulated predictions of our resource-rational model, corroborating the assumption that the identified biases originate from sampling. Our model and results provide a unifying perspective on perseverative and anchoring biases, show that they can jointly emerge from efficient belief-updating computations, and suggest that resource-rational adjustments of sampling computations can explain age-related changes in adaptive learning. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

Observational learning is essential for the acquisition of new behavior in educational practices and daily life and serves as an important mechanism for human cognitive and social-emotional development. However, we know little about its underlying neurocomputational mechanisms from a developmental perspective. In this study we used model-based fMRI to investigate differences in observational learning and individual learning between children and younger adults. Prediction errors (PE), the difference between experienced and predicted outcomes, related positively to striatal and ventral medial prefrontal cortex activation during individual learning and showed no age-related differences. PE-related activation during observational learning was more pronounced when outcomes were worse than predicted. Particularly, negative PE-coding in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex was stronger in adults compared to children and was associated with improved observational learning in children and adults. The current findings pave the way to better understand observational learning challenges across development and educational settings.

Many new technologies, such as smartphones, computers, or public-access systems (like ticket-vending machines), are a challenge for older adults. One feature that these technologies have in common is that they involve underlying, partially observable, structures (state spaces) that determine the actions that are necessary to reach a certain goal (e.g., to move from one menu to another, to change a function, or to activate a new service). In this work we provide a theoretical, neurocomputational account to explain these behavioral difficulties in older adults. Based on recent findings from age-comparative computational- and cognitive-neuroscience studies, we propose that age-related impairments in complex goal-directed behavior result from an underlying deficit in the representation of state spaces of cognitive tasks. Furthermore, we suggest that these age-related deficits in adaptive decision-making are due to impoverished neural representations in the orbitofrontal cortex and hippocampus.

Under high cognitive demands, older adults tend to resort to simpler, habitual, or model-free decision strategies. This age-related shift in decision behavior has been attributed to deficits in the representation of the cognitive maps, or state spaces, necessary for more complex model-based decision-making. Yet, the neural mechanisms behind this shift remain unclear. In this study, we used a modified 2-stage Markov task in combination with computational modeling and single-trial EEG analyses to establish neural markers of age-related changes in goal-directed decision-making under different demands on the representation of state spaces. Our results reveal that the shift to simpler decision strategies in older adults is due to (i) impairments in the representation of the transition structure of the task and (ii) a diminished signaling of the reward value associated with decision options. In line with the diminished state space hypothesis of human aging, our findings suggest that deficits in goal-directed, model-based behavior in older adults result from impairments in the representation of state spaces of cognitive tasks.

Humans show metacontrol of decision making, that is they adapt their reliance on decision-making strategies toward situational differences such as differences in reward magnitude. Specifically, when higher rewards are at stake, individuals increase reliance on a more accurate but cognitively effortful strategy. We investigated whether the personality trait Need for Cognition (NFC) explains individual differences in metacontrol. Based on findings of cognitive effort expenditure in executive functions, we expected more metacontrol in individuals low in NFC. In two independent studies, metacontrol was assessed by means of a decision-making task that dissociates different reinforcement-learning strategies and in which reward magnitude was manipulated across trials. In contrast to our expectations, NFC did not account for individual differences in metacontrol of decision making. In fact, a Bayesian analysis provided moderate to strong evidence against a relationship between NFC and metacontrol. Beyond this, there was no consistent evidence for relationship between NFC and overall model-based decision making. These findings show that the effect of rewards on the engagement of effortful decision-making strategies is largely independent of the intrinsic motivation for engaging in cognitively effortful tasks and suggest a differential role of NFC for the regulation of cognitive effort in decision making and executive functions.

Prevalence-induced concept change describes a cognitive mechanism by which someone's definition of a concept shifts as the prevalence of instances of that concept changes. While this phenomenon has been established in young adults, it is unclear how it affects older adults. In this study, we explore how prevalence-induced concept change affects older adults' lower-level, perceptual, and higher-order, ethical judgements. We find that older adults are less sensitive to prevalence-induced concept change than younger adults across both domains. Using computational modeling, we demonstrate that these age-related changes in judgements reflect more cautious and deliberate responding in older adults. Based on these findings, we argue that while overly cautious responding by older adults may be maladaptive in some cognitive domains, in the case of prevalence-induced concept change, it might be protective against biased judgements.

Body dissatisfaction is pervasive among young women in Western countries. Among the many forces that contribute to body dissatisfaction, the overrepresentation of thin bodies in visual media has received notable attention. In this study, we proposed that prevalence-induced concept change may be one of the cognitive mechanisms that explain how beauty standards shift. We conducted a preregistered online experiment with young women ( N = 419) and found that when the prevalence of thin bodies in the environment increased, the concept of being overweight expanded to include bodies that would otherwise be judged as “normal.” Exploratory analyses revealed significant individual differences in sensitivity to this effect, in terms of women’s judgments about other bodies as well as their own. These results suggest that women’s judgments about other women’s bodies are biased by an overrepresentation of thinness and lend initial support to policies designed to increase size-inclusive representation in the media.

The development of metacontrol of decision making and its susceptibility to framing effects were investigated in a sample of 201 adolescents and adults in Germany (12-25 years, 111 female, ethnicity not recorded). In a task that dissociates model-free and model-based decision making, outcome magnitude and outcome valence were manipulated. Both adolescents and adults showed metacontrol and metacontrol tended to increase across adolescence. Furthermore, model-based decision making was more pronounced for loss compared to gain frames but there was no evidence that this framing effect differed with age. Thus, the strategic adaptation of decision making continues to develop into young adulthood and for both adolescents and adults, losses increase the motivation to invest cognitive resources into an effortful decision-making strategy.

Decoding others’ intentions accurately in order to adapt one’s own behavior is pivotal throughout life. Yet, it is a process that is imbued with uncertainty since others’ intentions are not directly observable and may change over time. In this study, we asked the question of how younger and older adults deal with uncertainty in dynamic social environments. We used an advice-taking paradigm together with biologically plausible hierarchical Bayesian modelling to characterize effects and mechanisms of aging on learning about others’ time-varying intentions. We observed age differences when comparing learning on two levels of social uncertainty: the fidelity of the adviser and the stability of intentions. We found that, prior to having any experience with the adviser, older adults expected the adviser to change his/her intentions more frequently. They also showed higher confidence in such beliefs and were less willing to change their beliefs over the course of the experiment. This led them to update their predictions about observable outcomes (i.e., advice correctness) more quickly. Potentially indicative of stereotype effects, we also observed that older advisers were perceived as more volatile, but at the same time, more faithful than younger advisers. Together these findings offer new insights into the behavioral and algorithmic mechanisms underlying adult age differences in response to social uncertainty, putatively driven by aging-related changes in neuromodulation to be tested in future studies.

Previous work suggests that lifespan developmental differences in cognitive control reflect maturational and aging-related changes in prefrontal cortex functioning. However, complementary explanations exist: It could be that children and older adults differ from younger adults in how they balance the effort of engaging in control against its potential benefits. Here we test whether the degree of cognitive effort expenditure depends on the opportunity cost of time (average reward rate per unit time): if the average reward rate is high, participants should withhold cognitive effort whereas if it is low, they should invest more. In Experiment 1, we examine this hypothesis in children, adolescents, younger, and older adults, by applying a reward rate manipulation in two cognitive control tasks: a modified Erikson Flanker and a task-switching paradigm. We found that young adults and adolescents reflexively withheld effort when the opportunity cost of time was high, whereas older adults and, to a lesser degree children, invested more resources to accumulate reward as quickly as possible. We tentatively interpret these results in terms of age- and task-specific differences in the processing of the opportunity cost of time. We qualify our findings in a second experiment in younger adults in which we address an alternative explanation of our results and show that the observed age differences in effort expenditure may not result from differences in task difficulty. To conclude, we think that our results present an interesting first step at relating opportunity costs to motivational processes across the lifespan. We frame the implications of further work in this area within a recent developmental model of resource-rationality, which points to developmental sweet spots in cognitive control.

Over the last decade, research on cognitive control and decision-making has revealed that individuals weigh the costs and benefits of engaging in or refraining from control and that whether and how they engage in these cost-benefit analyses may change across development and during healthy aging. In the present article, we examine how lifespan age differences in cognitive abilities affect the meta-control of behavioral strategies across the lifespan and how motivation affects these trade-offs. Based on accumulated evidence, we highlight two hypotheses that may explain the existing results better than current models. In contrast to previous theoretical accounts, we assume that age differences in the engagement in cost-benefit trade-offs reflect a resource-rational adaptation to internal and external constraints that arise across the lifespan. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Development and Aging Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making.

Across the lifespan, humans rely on the ability to learn from new experiences to adapt to uncertain and changing environments. Here we investigated age-related differences in the reliance on default-belief settings during learning in these environments. We collected behavioral data with a predictive-inference task in children, adolescents as well as younger and older adults. Using a Bayesian belief-updating model, we first showed that age-related learning differences might be due to a reduced ability to adjust learning according to dissociable normative factors. The results revealed a reduced consideration of uncertainty in older adults and increased perseveration in both children and older adults. Simulations indicated that interventions to reduce perseveration might lead to more similar performance levels between the age groups. In a follow-up experiment, we found that one such intervention which randomly distorted participants' initial predictions strongly reduced perseveration, but led to increased performance differences. This counter-intuitive effect resulted from an environmental control of learning in children and older adults through random information from the intervention to reduce perseveration. Across the two experiments, our findings show that age-related learning impairments can be explained with insufficient updating from a default belief. In stable environments, this results in perseverative behavior, while in the presence of random environmental information, it leads to environmental control. We formalized the emergence of these belief-updating behaviors with a model that updated beliefs only to an acceptable level of plausibility, suggesting that children and older adults are more quickly satisfied to report beliefs that reflect their default than younger adults. This model not only accounted for our own findings but might also provide a new perspective on a wide variety of previous findings in the developmental and aging literature.

Metacontrol refers to the human ability to dynamically adapt decision-making strategies to changes in internal and external demands. In this study, we investigated the development of metacontrol from adolescence into young adulthood as well as developmental differences in the sensitivity of metacontrol to framing effects. Adolescents and young adults were assessed with a decision-making task that dissociates model-free and model-based decision-making strategies. In this task, we manipulated outcome magnitude and outcome valence, i.e. the framing of outcomes. With increasing age, we found a greater adaptation of model-based decision making to outcome magnitudes. Model-based decision making was more pronounced for loss compared to gain frames but this framing effect did not differ with age. Our findings suggest that metacontrol continues to develop into young adulthood. While losses generally increase the motivation to invest cognitive resources into an effortful decision-making strategy, the development of metacontrol is not sensitive to framing effects.

Prevalence-induced concept change describes a cognitive phenomenon whereby judgements about concepts shift as the prevalence of exemplars of that concept changes. For instance, in a task where people have to judge whether the colour of an ambiguously-coloured dot is blue or purple, if the frequency of objectively blue dots in the environment decreases, people judge more dots to be blue than they did initially. While this phenomenon has been explored in young adults, it is unclear how it affects older adults. Past work suggests that older adults simultaneously rely less on internal representations, but that they also tend to perseverate more on cognitive tasks. Thus, the question arises: Do older adults outsource control and their decisions become more susceptible to change or are they more rigid in their judgements than younger and resistant to prevalence-induced concept change? In the current study, we explore how prevalence-induced concept change affects older adults’ lower-level, perceptual, and higher-order, ethical, decision-making. We find that older adults are less sensitive to prevalence-induced concept change than younger adults across both domains. An exploratory analysis is conducted on response times to help elucidate the mechanism(s) underlying these differences. These analyses demonstrate that older adults respond more slowly than younger adults in both tasks. We offer two interpretations of this finding, both with implications for prevalence-induced concept change research more broadly: general slowing and/or a speed-accuracy trade-off. Overall, our results suggest that older adults’ judgements about concepts may be less flexible than younger adults’ when faced with a changing world.

Adolescence is a period of life in which social influences-particularly if they come from peers-play a critical role in shaping learning and decision preferences. Recent studies in adults show evidence of a risk contagion effect; that is, individual risk preferences are modulated by observing and learning from others' risk-related decisions. In this study, using choice data and computational modeling, we demonstrate stronger risk contagion in male adolescents when observing peers compared to nonpeers. This effect was only present when the observed peer showed risk-seeking preferences. Moreover, adolescents represented the peers' decisions better than those of adults. Intriguingly, the degree of peer-biased risk contagion in adolescents was positively associated with real-life social integration. Contrary to previous accounts, our data suggest that peer conformity during risky decision-making in adolescence is a socially motivated, deliberative process. Susceptibility to peer influence in adolescence might be adaptive, associated with higher degrees of social functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Previous work suggests that lifespan developmental differences in cognitive control abilitiesmight be due to maturational and aging-related changes in prefrontal cortex functioning.However, there are other explanations: For example, it could be that children and older adults differ from younger adults in how they balance the effort of engaging in control against its potential benefits. In this work, we assume that the degree of engagement in cognitive effort depends on the opportunity cost of time (average reward rate per unit time). If the average reward rate is high, participants should speed up responding whereas if it is low, they should respond more slowly. Developmental changes in opportunity cost assessments may lead to differences in the sensitivity to changes in reward rate. To examine this hypothesis in children, adolescents, younger, and older adults, we applied a reward rate manipulation in two well-established cognitive control tasks: a modified Erikson Flanker and a task-switching paradigm. We found a significant interaction between age group and average reward rate, such that older adults were more sensitive to the average reward rate than the other age groups. However, as task complexity increased (from the Flanker task to the task-switching paradigm), children also became sensitive to changes in reward rate. This may suggest that when demands on cognitive load reach capacity limitations, participants engage in strategic behaviour to optimize performance: a view we present as the “sweet sport” argument of effort allocation.

Humans employ different strategies when making decisions. Previous research has reported reduced reliance on model-based strategies with aging, but it remains unclear whether this is due to cognitive or motivational factors. Moreover, it is not clear how aging affects the metacontrol of decision making, that is the dynamic adaptation of decision-making strategies to varying situational demands. In this cross-sectional study, we tested younger and older adults in a sequential decision-making task that dissociates model-free and model-based strategies. In contrast to previous research, model-based strategies led to higher payoffs. Moreover, we manipulated the costs and benefits of model-based strategies by varying reward magnitude and the stability of the task structure. Compared to younger adults, older adults showed reduced model-based decision making and less adaptation of decision-making strategies. Our findings suggest that aging affects the metacontrol of decision-making strategies and that reduced model-based strategies in older adults are due to limited cognitive abilities.