Sozial-, Wirtschafts- und Entscheidungspsychologie


Social, Economic, and Decision Psychology Blog

Archive for March, 2015

search and the aging mind

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Bettina von Helversen and I have a new paper out on age differences in search in TopiCS. The literature is still scarce on this issue but we try to take stock of the idea that age differences in internal and external search are due to age-related cognitive decline. The goal is to do more empirical work on this in the future…

Here’s the abstract:

Search is a prerequisite for successful performance in a broad range of tasks ranging from making decisions between consumer goods to memory retrieval. How does aging impact search processes in such disparate situations? Aging is associated with structural and neuromodulatory brain changes that underlie cognitive control processes, which in turn have been proposed as a domain-general mechanism controlling search in external environments as well as memory. We review the aging literature to evaluate the cognitive control hypothesis that suggests that age-related change in cognitive control underlies age differences in both external and internal search. We also consider the limits of the cognitive control hypothesis and propose additional mechanisms such as changes in strategy use and affect that may be necessary to understand how aging affects search.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tops.12139/full

Conferences: Decision Neuroscience and Aging & TeaP

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CDS is busy going to conferences this week… Loreen Mamerow and I are at the Scientific Research Network on Decision Neuroscience and Aging Conference, Miami, Florida, USA, where a lot of interesting speakers are talking about their latest work on age differences in decision making.

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David Kellen and Renato Frey are at the TeaP (Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen, Conference of Experimental Psychologists), Hildesheim, Germany, presenting work on cognitive modeling of memory, decision making, and risk taking. You can find a pdf of the TeaP program here.

Age and Wealth

One interesting issue in life span development is how age-related changes in different core abilities, like attention, memory, and so on, impact achievement in the real world, such as everyday financial and health decisions. Many areas of performance show an inverted-U shape across the life span, with improvements being typically seen during adolescence and young adulthood, and decline being more often than not observed in older age. I just read that Forbes has a new list of billionaires and that got me thinking whether such a pattern exists for such things as wealth?

I took the data from Forbes (N = 1762 for which age and net worth was available) and, as can be seen below, the mean age of billionaires is around 60. There could be a number of reasons for this but one likely factor is that it takes time to accumulate wealth (Forbes writes that the majority of millionaires, ca. 1200, are self-made billionaires with the rest having inherited their fortunes).

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But does wealth show an inverted-U like shape across the life span? The Forbes data suggest it does not. It looks like there is a positive correlation between age and net worth, suggesting that old age does not lead losses in accumulated capital… In this way, capital seems to work a bit like the accumulation of knowledge which tends to show a gradual increase across the life span.

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