Decision making across the life span

Learning to choose adaptively between different behavioral options in order to reach goals is a pervasive task in life for people of all ages. Individuals are often confronted with complex, uncertain situations that nonetheless require decisive actions that would facilitate the pursuit of short-term or long-term goals. Adaptive decision making as such entails interactions between processes that monitor the choice-outcome relations as well as processes that evaluate these relations with respect to goal relevance. These dynamics implicate close interplays between attention, learning, memory, motivation, and emotion, which are subserved by cortical-subcortical networks and are neurochemically regulated by transmitters, such as norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin. Across the life span, these functional brain circuits as well as neurotransmitter systems undergo basic biological maturation and senescence as well as plasticity due to the accumulation of experience or changes in motivational goals. Studying decision making across different adult life periods may shed light on how the very processes of decision making adapt to constraints on brain resources due to aging, how these processes benefit from experience, or how decision making is influenced by shifting goals.

The aim of this Research Topic in Frontiers in Decision Neuroscience is to open a forum for the subfield of decision science that focuses on comparing and contrasting decision making in people of different ages.