title: The Rational Adolescent: Strategic Information Processing during Decision Making Revealed by Eye Tracking.
abstract: Adolescence is often viewed as a time of irrational, risky decision-making - despite adolescents' competence in other cognitive domains. In this study, we examined the strategies used by adolescents (N=30) and young adults (N=47) to resolve complex, multi-outcome economic gambles. Compared to adults, adolescents were more likely to make conservative, loss-minimizing choices consistent with economic models. Eye-tracking data showed that prior to decisions, adolescents acquired more information in a more thorough manner; that is, they engaged in a more analytic processing strategy indicative of trade-offs between decision variables. In contrast, young adults' decisions were more consistent with heuristics that simplified the decision problem, at the expense of analytic precision. Collectively, these results demonstrate a counter-intuitive developmental transition in economic decision making: adolescents' decisions are more consistent with rational-choice models, while young adults more readily engage task-appropriate heuristics.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA, 01003.
authors.forename: Youngbin
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Kwak
authors.affiliation: The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA, 27708.
authors.forename: John W
authors.initials: JW
authors.lastname: Payne
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA, 01003.
authors.forename: Andrew L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Cohen
authors.affiliation: Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA, 27708 ; Duke Center for Interdisciplinary Decision Sciences, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA, 27708 ; Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA, 27708.
authors.forename: Scott A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Huettel
keywords: adolescent; decision strategy; eye tracking; heuristics