Validating Habitual and Goal-Directed Decision-Making Performance Online in Healthy Older Adults

• Main Authors: Kaori L. Ito, Laura Cao, Renee Reinberg, Brenton Keller, John Monterosso, Nicolas Schweighofer, Sook-Lei Liew
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-06-01
• Series: Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience
• Subjects: validating; decision-making; goal-directed; habitual; aging; older adults
• Online Access: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnagi.2021.702810/full

Everyday decision-making is supported by a dual-system of control comprised of parallel goal-directed and habitual systems. Over the past decade, the two-stage Markov decision task has become popularized for its ability to dissociate between goal-directed and habitual decision-making. While a handful of studies have implemented decision-making tasks online, only one study has validated the task by comparing in-person and web-based performance on the two-stage task in children and young adults. To date, no study has validated the dissociation of goal-directed and habitual behaviors in older adults online. Here, we implemented and validated a web-based version of the two-stage Markov task using parameter simulation and recovery and compared behavioral results from online and in-person participation on the two-stage task in both young and healthy older adults. We found no differences in estimated free parameters between online and in-person participation on the two-stage task. Further, we replicate previous findings that young adults are more goal-directed than older adults both in-person and online. Overall, this work demonstrates that the implementation and use of the two-stage Markov decision task for remote participation is feasible in the older adult demographic, which would allow for the study of decision-making with larger and more diverse samples.