The Rational Adolescent: Strategic Information Processing during Decision Making Revealed by Eye Tracking.
Abstract
Adolescence is often viewed as a time of irrational, risky decision-making - despite
adolescents' competence in other cognitive domains. In this study, we examined the
strategies used by adolescents (N=30) and young adults (N=47) to resolve complex,
multi-outcome economic gambles. Compared to adults, adolescents were more likely to
make conservative, loss-minimizing choices consistent with economic models. Eye-tracking
data showed that prior to decisions, adolescents acquired more information in a more
thorough manner; that is, they engaged in a more analytic processing strategy indicative
of trade-offs between decision variables. In contrast, young adults' decisions were
more consistent with heuristics that simplified the decision problem, at the expense
of analytic precision. Collectively, these results demonstrate a counter-intuitive
developmental transition in economic decision making: adolescents' decisions are more
consistent with rational-choice models, while young adults more readily engage task-appropriate
heuristics.
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Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/10590Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1016/j.cogdev.2015.08.001Publication Info
Kwak, Y; Payne, JW; Cohen, AL; & Huettel, SA (2015). The Rational Adolescent: Strategic Information Processing during Decision Making Revealed
by Eye Tracking. Cogn Dev, 36. pp. 20-30. 10.1016/j.cogdev.2015.08.001. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/10590.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
Scott Huettel
Professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience
Research in my laboratory investigates the brain mechanisms underlying economic and
social decision making; collectively, this research falls into the field of “decision
neuroscience” or "neuroeconomics". My laboratory uses fMRI to probe brain function,
behavioral assays to characterize individual differences, and other physiological
methods (e.g., eye tracking, pharmacological manipulation, genetics) to link brain
and behavior. Concurrent with research on basic processes, my labo
John W. Payne
Professor Emeritus of Business Administration
John W. Payne is the Joseph J. Ruvane Professor Emeritus of Business Administration
at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University. He also had appointments as a Professor
of Psychology and Neuroscience and as a Professor of Law at Duke University. His education
includes a B.A. 1969, M.A. 1972, Ph.D. 1973 in Psychology from the University of California,
Irvine. He held a position as a postdoctoral fellow in Cognitive Psychology at Carnegie-Mellon
University, 1973-74. Pr
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