Figure 4
Memory precision and age differentially modulate the influence of experience on decisions. Both Lure Discrimination Index and Age separately tracked individuals’ use of distinct experience-derived choice influences. (A) Memory sampling increases with memory precision. Consistent with theoretical and empirical findings that uncertainty is a critical factor in the weight of decision strategies, increased memory precision was associated with an increase in the use of the memory sampling strategy in choice: \({r}_{\tau }(225)=.228, p<.001\). (B) Choices are less sensitive to reinforcement learning with age. Consistent with previous findings that choice noise increases with age, participants exhibited less influence of Reinforcement Learning-derived values with age. \({r}_{\tau }(359)=-.087, p=.015\). (C) Perseveration increases across the lifespan. Consistent with previous findings, participants exhibited a greater tendency towards perseverative responding with age. \({r}_{\tau }(359)=.101, p=.0048\). All correlations plotted for each experiment individually (Experiment 1: yellow, Experiment 2: blue, shaded bands represent 95%CI around the trendline), and statistics reported for the combined sample. Correlations were not different between experiment samples (\(LDI*{\beta }_{sampler}: z=-0.21, p=.417; Age*{\beta }_{TD}: z=-0.704, p=.241; Age*{\beta }_{persev}: z=0.446, p=.328\)).
