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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.

SUBMITTER: Kwak Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4571495 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Oct-Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The Rational Adolescent: Strategic Information Processing during Decision Making Revealed by Eye Tracking.

Kwak Youngbin Y   Payne John W JW   Cohen Andrew L AL   Huettel Scott A SA  

Cognitive development 20151001


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  ...[more]

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