Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

The Impact of Ambiguity and Aging on Decision Making Across Probabilistic, Temporal and Effort Discounting

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Galston Wong^1,2 (galston.wong@utdallas.edu), Amelia Bradley^1,2, Alina Ali^1,2, Kendra L. Seaman^1,2; ¹The University of Texas at Dallas, ²Center for Vital Longevity

Ambiguity aversion is commonly observed in many behavioral studies on risk, where people are less likely to gamble on imprecise information compared to those with clearly defined risks. However, less empirical work has examined how ambiguity impacts behavioral preferences beyond probabilistic risks, such as temporal and effort discounting. Additionally, less is known about how aging may influence these behavioral preferences under ambiguity. In our ongoing study, we are recruiting 90 adult participants (aged 25 to 85) to perform three different two-choice economic discounting tasks for hypothetical monetary gains: probability, temporal, and cognitive effort discounting. Participants indicate their preferences between a small cost-small gain option and a large cost-large gain option, where the cost is task-dependent (probabilistic, time delay or cognitive effort). Ambiguity is presented in half of the trials by masking the exact costs required to achieve the larger cost-gains; effectively presenting a range of potential costs. Computational modeling will be used to estimate participant’s ambiguity attitudes, based on variations of hyperbolic discounting functions. These estimates will be used to address our two main research aims: (A) whether intra-individual ambiguity attitudes are consistently expressed across the three tasks, and (B) whether ambiguity attitudes are impacted by age differences. We predict that ambiguity aversion would be domain-specific to the cost, and that it would increase with age. These findings will hopefully shed light on potential differences in ambiguity aversion across various contexts and age groups, with the intent of motivating future studies to explain why we might observe these potential differences.

Topic Area: THINKING: Decision making