{"doi":"10.31234/osf.io/64jnk","title":"Differential impacts of healthy cognitive aging on directed and random exploration","abstract":"Deciding whether to explore unknown opportunities or exploit well-known options is a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives. Extensive work in college students suggests that young people use two strategies to make these “explore-exploit” decisions: directed exploration, where exploration of uncertain options is driven by information seeking, and random exploration, where exploration is driven by chance. Whether, and to what extent, older adults use the same strategies is unknown. To address this question, 51 older adults (ages 65-74) and 32 younger adults (ages 18-25) completed the Horizon Task, a gambling task that quantifies directed and random exploration as well as “baseline” measures of uncertainty preference and behavioral variability. We found that older adults do indeed use directed and random exploration, but that there are quantitative differences between age groups. Older adults showed more uncertainty aversion and less random exploration than younger adults, while their directed exploration and baseline behavioral variability were the same as younger adults. In addition, we found a subset of approximately 26% of older adults who showed “extreme ambiguity aversion,” almost never choosing to explore a lesser-known option, even when it was clearly the better choice. Unsurprisingly, such extreme ambiguity aversion led to worse performance on the task for this group. Conversely, task performance in the remaining “non-ambiguity averse” older adults was better than younger adults suggesting that age-related differences in explore-exploit decision making may be adaptive except when it is taken to extremes.","journal":"PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)","year":2022,"id":299623,"datarank":0.2543854152730025,"base_score":1.6094379124341003,"endowment":1.6094379124341003,"self_citation_contribution":0.24141568686511508,"citation_network_contribution":0.012969728407887404,"self_endowment_contribution":0.24141568686511508,"citer_contribution":0.012969728407887404,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":4,"citer_count":1,"citers_with_citation_signal":1,"citers_with_endowment":1,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9559,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2022-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":989519,"name":"Siyu Wang","orcid":"0000-0002-4278-7468","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":989967,"name":"Alec Frisvold","orcid":null,"position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":989968,"name":"Lily Alvarado","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":989969,"name":"Alex Farrell-Skupny","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":989520,"name":"Waitsang Keung","orcid":"0000-0002-9647-4790","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":383265,"name":"Mark Sundman","orcid":"0009-0004-8092-1498","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":989970,"name":"Mary-Kathryn Franchetti","orcid":null,"position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":383273,"name":"Ying‐hui Chou","orcid":"0000-0003-0707-286X","position":8,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":277891,"name":"Gene E. Alexander","orcid":"0000-0002-6476-5606","position":9,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":23483,"name":"Robert C. Wilson","orcid":"0000-0002-2963-2971","position":10,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":383266,"name":"Jack-Morgan Mizell","orcid":"0000-0002-6198-4424","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":61,"raw_metadata":{"citation_network_status":"fetched"},"created_at":"2026-07-19T00:31:44.904250Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}