New lab tests measure “wisdom”

WORLD SCIENCE

Re­search­ers have de­vel­oped what they call some of the lab­o­r­a­to­ry tests that meas­ure “wis­dom.”

We make de­ci­sions all our lives—so you’d think we’d get bet­ter and bet­ter at it. Yet past re­search has shown that young­er adults are bet­ter de­ci­sion mak­ers than old­er ones. Some Tex­as psy­chol­o­gists, puz­zled by these find­ings, sus­pected the ex­pe­ri­ments were bi­ased to­ward young­er brains.

So, rath­er than test­ing the abil­ity to make de­ci­sions one at a time with­out re­gard to past or fu­ture, as ear­li­er re­search did, these psy­chol­o­gists de­signed a mod­el re­quir­ing par­ti­ci­pants to eval­u­ate each re­sult in or­der to strate­gize the next choice, more like de­ci­sion mak­ing in the real world.

The re­sults: The old­er de­ci­sion mak­ers trounced their ju­niors. The find­ings are to be pub­lished in Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence, a jour­nal of the Wash­ing­ton, D.C.-based As­socia­t­ion for Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence.

“We found that old­er adults are bet­ter at eval­u­at­ing the im­me­di­ate and de­layed ben­e­fits of each op­tion they choose from. They are bet­ter at cre­at­ing strate­gies in re­sponse to the en­vi­ron­ment,” said Dar­rell Wor­thy of Tex­as A&M Uni­vers­ity, who con­ducted the study with col­leagues at the Uni­vers­ity of Tex­as at Aus­tin.

In a first ex­pe­ri­ment, groups of old­er (ages 60 to early 80s) and young­er (college-age) adults re­ceived points each time they chose from one of four op­tions and tried to max­im­ize the points they earned. In this por­tion, the young­er adults were more ef­fi­cient at se­lect­ing the op­tions that yielded more points.

In the sec­ond ex­pe­ri­men­t—the set­up was a sham test of two “oxy­gen ac­cu­mu­la­tors” on Mars—the re­wards re­ceived de­pended on the choices made pre­vi­ously. The “de­creas­ing op­tion” gave a larg­er num­ber of points on each tri­al, but caused re­wards on fu­ture tri­als to be low­er. The “in­creas­ing op­tion” gave a smaller re­ward on each tri­al but caused re­wards on fu­ture tri­als to in­crease. In one ver­sion of the test, the in­creas­ing op­tion led to more points earned over the course of the ex­pe­ri­ment; in an­oth­er, chas­ing the in­creas­ing op­tion could­n’t make up for the points that could be ac­crued grab­bing the big­ger bite on each tri­al.

The old­er adults did bet­ter on eve­ry ver­sion, the re­search­ers said.

“The young­er adults were bet­ter when only the im­me­di­ate re­wards needed to be con­sid­ered,” said Wor­thy. “But the sec­ond ex­pe­ri­ment re­quired de­vel­op­ing a the­o­ry about how re­wards in the en­vi­ron­ment were struc­tured. The more ex­perience you have in this, the bet­ter you are bet­ter at it.”

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