Information about foregone rewards impedes dynamic decision-making in older adults

FOREGONE REWARDS AND AGING 1 Information about Foregone Rewards Impedes Dynamic Decision-Making in Older Adults

“Making an informed decision” implies that more information leads to better decisions, yet it may be the case that additional information biases decisions in a systematic and sometimes detrimental manner. In the present study we examined the effect of additional information on older adults’ decision-making using a task for which available rewards were dependent on the participant’s recent patte...

You don’t want to know what you’re missing: When information about forgone rewards impedes dynamic decision making

When people learn to make decisions from experience, a reasonable intuition is that additional relevant information should improve their performance. In contrast, we find that additional information about foregone rewards (i.e., what could have gained at each point by making a different choice) severely hinders participants’ ability to repeatedly make choices that maximize long-term gains. We c...

Information selectivity in decision making by younger and older adults

P ast research has demonstrated that older adults are more likely than younger adults to exhibit information selectivity in decision making. Two alternative explanations have been proposed to account for this age difference. One explanation attributes the increase in information selectivity to older adults’ reliance on prior knowledge, whereas the other explanation suggests that it reflects red...

Balancing Risks and Rewards: How Attitudinal Ambivalence Influences Information-Processing and Decision-Making About Emerging Technologies

Information Handling in Dynamic Decision Making Environments

In this paper we describe our observations about information handling in the complex and dynamic decision making environment of ambulance control, more formally known as Emergency Medical Dispatch. Our findings suggest that the information handling capacity of individual dispatchers and of the system as a whole is affected by the difficulties they face in handling information, and this is exhib...