UCF Deciding Brains

The purpose of this research study is to understand how people make trust-related decisions in healthy aging.

Participants will be asked to complete one study session on the University of Central Florida (UCF) campus. The study session will be conducted in a private testing room and include a series of computerized cognitive tasks and learning games, as well as surveys of your beliefs, preferences, and past experiences.

The study will take a total of approximately 3.5 hours to completed. You will be allowed to take breaks during the session as needed. If you begin the study but do not complete the session, you will receive credit commensurate with your participation.

Much of human interaction is based on trust. Optimal trust-related decision making and avoiding exploitation require the ability to learn about the trustworthiness of social partners across multiple interactions, but the role that learning plays in determining age deficits in trust decisions is currently unknown. To address this gap, this project will characterize basic cognitive processes in learning to trust and distrust in healthy aging.

The present study will examine age differences in learning to trust using laboratory tasks and surveys. The investigators hypothesize that social cues of trustworthiness will bias learning more in older adults (social cue bias, H1). Further, we predict that social cues of trustworthiness will interact with weighting of negative (loss aversion bias, H2) and recent (recency bias; H3) outcomes, and that these biases are exacerbated in older adults compared with younger adults (H4).

Young adult participants (age 20-39 years) will be recruited through the SONA pool. Older adult participants (age 60 and older) will be recruited from the University of Central Florida (UCF) Learning and Longevity Research Network (LLRN) registry and will be contacted by lab personnel via emails. Emails retrieved from the LLRN registry are provided by older-aged participants who wished to be contacted for research. Older adults will be screened to exclude those with cognitive impairment before being invited to participate. Those who meet criteria for inclusion in the study, will be scheduled for a study session in the lab.

Eligibility Criteria:
Inclusion Criteria:

* Younger adults only: Age 20-39 years old
* Older adults only: Age 60 years old and older
* Fluent English speaker
* At least 8th grade education
* On a stable regimen of medications
* Able to provide verbal and written informed consent
* Normal cognitive function

  * Older adults only: The above will be assessed/confirmed via cognitive screening assessments
  * Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status (TICS-M; see "Telephone Interview for Cognitive Status" in Local Site Documents)

Exclusion Criteria:

* Pregnant
* Presence of:

  * Schizophrenia Spectrum or Other Psychotic Disorders
  * Bipolar and Related Disorders
  * Depressive Disorders
  * Anxiety Disorders
  * Trauma- and Stressor-Related Disorders
  * Substance-Related and Addictive Disorders
* Current anticonvulsant, neuroleptic, or sedative use
* Uncorrected visual and hearing impairments
* Neurologic condition or event affecting the brain in the last 12 months (e.g., stroke, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury with \>30-minute loss of consciousness)
* History of brain surgery including tumor resection, deep brain resection, pallidotomy, and thalamotomy
* Unstable medical illness (e.g., metastatic cancer)
* Significant cardiovascular condition or event in the last 12 months (e.g., major heart attack, heart bypass surgery