Age-related differences in adaptive decision making: Sensitivity to expected value in risky choice

By I. Levin, Joshua A. Weller, A. Pederson, L. Harshman. Judgment and Decision Making, 2007

147 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While previous research has found that children make more risky decisions than their parents, little is known about the developmental trajectory for the ability to make advantageous decisions. In a sample of children, 5-11 years old, we administered a new risky decision making task in which the relative expected value (EV) of the risky and riskless choice options was varied over trials. Younger children (age 5-7) showed significantly less responsiveness to EV differences than their parents on both trials involving risky gains and trials involving risky losses. For older children (age 8-11) this deficit was smaller overall but was greater on loss trials than on gain trials. Children of both ages made more risky choices than adults when risky choices were disadvantageous. We further analyzed these results in terms of children's ability to utilize probability and outcome information, and discussed them in terms of developing brain structures vital for decision making under uncertainty.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Developmental and Educational Psychology, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a748529e8185604c4f20b55e1a39c52380a96924

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In Applied Psychology

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In General Decision Sciences

Citations in the corpus

Intuition in Judgment and Decision Making: Extensive Thinking Without Effort (2010, background): “Members of the JDM community only occasionally study child decision making (eg, Levin, Weller, Pederson & Harshman, 2007 ; Reyna & Ellis, 1994 ).”
The Decision Making Individual Differences Inventory and guidelines for the study of individual differences in judgment and decision-making research (2011, background): “The Balloon Analog Risk Task (BART; Lejuez et al., 2002), Columbia Card Task (CCT; Figner et al., 2009), Cups Task (Levin & Hart, 2003; Levin et al., 2007), and Iowa Gambling Task (Bechara et al., 1994) are examples of behavioral measures of risk.”
Defining and Measuring Financial Literacy (2009, background): “Recent research has focused on more behaviorally-proximal cognitive skills, including decision-making competence (Bruine de Bruine et al., 2007; Parker & Fischhoff, 2005; Finucane et al., 2005; Levin et al., 2007).”
Adolescent risky decision-making: Neurocognitive development of reward and control regions (2010, background): “study adults had a more accurate representation of the expected value associated with the two choice options (Levin et al., 2007), and consequently chose the options with the highest expected value more often (which were the low-risk choices).”