Washington, June 2 (IANS) Just because your mom has turned 85, you shouldn’t assume you’ll have to take over her financial matters. She may be just as good or better than you at making quick, sound, money-making decisions, according to researchers at the Duke University Medical Centre (DUMC).
‘It’s not age, it’s cognition that makes the difference in decision-making,’ said Scott
Huettel, DUMC associate professor of psychology and neuroscience.
He recently led a lab study in which participants could gain or lose money based on their decisions.
‘Once we accounted for cognitive abilities like memory and processing speed, age had nothing to do with predicting whether an individual would make the best economic decisions on the tasks we assigned,’ Huettel said.
They also tested subjects’ cognitive abilities – including both how fast they could process new information and how well they could remember that information.
They worked with 54 older adults between 66 and 76 years of age and 58 younger adults between 18 and 35 years of age.
‘The standard perspective is that age itself causes people to make more risky, lower-quality decisions – independent of the cognitive changes associated with age,’ said Huettel, ‘But that isn’t what we found.’
Many of the older subjects, aged 66 to 76, made similar decisions to many of the younger subjects (aged 18 to 35). ‘The stereotype of all older adults becoming more risk-averse is simply wrong,’ Huettel said.
‘Some of the older subjects we studied were able to make better decisions than younger subjects who scored lower on tests of their cognitive abilities,’ Huettel said.
‘If I took 20 younger adults and 20 older adults, all of whom were above average on these measures, then on average, you could not tell them apart based on decisions,’ Huettel added, according to a DUMC release.
‘On the whole, it is true, more older people process slowly and has poorer memory. But there are also older people who do as well as younger people.’
The study was published in Psychology and Aging.
