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.
Duke Scholars
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Related Subject Headings
- Developmental & Child Psychology
- 5205 Social and personality psychology
- 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology
- 5201 Applied and developmental psychology
- 1702 Cognitive Sciences
- 1701 Psychology
- 0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing
Citation
Published In
DOI
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Developmental & Child Psychology
- 5205 Social and personality psychology
- 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology
- 5201 Applied and developmental psychology
- 1702 Cognitive Sciences
- 1701 Psychology
- 0801 Artificial Intelligence and Image Processing