>> Decision-Making and Judgement

	Interview with Denise Park, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign From Studying The Mind, VHS © 2003, W. W. Norton

Are there any advantages to the cognitive changes that occur with age?

As we age we develop a rich trove of experiences, and if we're professionals, a great deal of knowledge about our profession. And experience can be very important when confronted with a complex problem. Solutions to problems and real world issues are not typically determined just by how fast or how much can you process at any given moment. Rather what's really important is how good you are at drawing from many different experiences and looking at things from alternate perspectives. And I certainly think there are situations where older adults are not only as good at solving problems as younger adults, but maybe even be better. All of us can think of situations where we wish we'd have been slower to respond. And I think a little more reflectiveness and less speeded response in a complex social cognitive environment, such as a work or an interpersonal environment, can lead to better judgment and better decisions.

I don't think it's an accident that people's careers peak in their mid-40s and mid-50s, because that's when individuals have lots of knowledge yet still have a lot of processing ability. And I also don't think that it's an accident that we frequently consider older people to be wiser. I think the wisdom comes from this rich trove of experience and the sure knowledge that information processing and speed in making decisions and forming judgments isn't always the best thing.

Do older and younger adults differ in their decision-making processes?

An important issue that isn't studied perhaps as much as it should be, is how older people go about performing complex behaviors in contrast to other people in their everyday lives. And one area where I think decision-making and judgments become very important is in the medical domain. People make life and death decisions, and given that the cognitive system declines with age, how do older and younger people go about making medical choices and medical decisions? Do they make good decisions? And I think this is a critical issue. It has implications for the way we spend health dollars, and ultimately has implications for an individual's survival.

There have been a couple of studies done on this topic. We did one study in our lab and another study was done by Bonnie Meyer and colleagues on breast cancer. We studied decisions about estrogen replacement therapy in young, middle aged, and older women. Both groups found that young women seek out a lot of information and take a lot of time to make a judgment about what should they do about treatment. It's almost as if they have many cognitive resources and they want to use those resources to consume information. Older women will seek out less information and make decisions more quickly with respect to medical treatment. Interestingly, the young women and the older women don't make different decisions. They just use different routes to get there. And I think that's a nice analogy to neurobiology. Young people and old people don't always show the same neurobiological circuitry but they can show equivalent performance, and we can look at the different neural and behavioral routes that are used to get there. Recognizing that people can use different routes and techniques to make good judgments is an important aspect of understanding aging.