School of Psychology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia.
Gerontology. 2010;56(4):430-4; discussion 435-40. doi: 10.1159/000275060. Epub 2010 Jan 12.
This paper critiques Brand and Markowitsch's viewpoint that the decision-making difficulties experienced by older adults during laboratory-based gambling tasks can be attributed to deficits in executive control and feedback operations. While Brand and Markowitsch provide an important platform with which to understand the role of these specific component processes, there are other additional mechanisms that also seem likely to be important when understanding gambling decisions in late adulthood. We focus on several of these mechanisms, and in particular, the manner in which decision-relevant information is received, the role of changes in emotion and motivation (with particular reference to Socioemotional Selectivity Theory), and changes in autobiographical memory that may affect understanding how decision-making during gambling occurs in late adulthood. By building on the cognitive-based and emotion-based processes that Brand and Markowitsch mention as important in decision-making by the aged, our critique highlights avenues for future research in this important area.
本文批评了 Brand 和 Markowitsch 的观点，即老年人在基于实验室的赌博任务中所经历的决策困难可以归因于执行控制和反馈操作的缺陷。虽然 Brand 和 Markowitsch 提供了一个重要的平台来理解这些特定组成过程的作用，但在理解晚年赌博决策时，似乎还有其他额外的机制也很重要。我们关注其中的几个机制，特别是决策相关信息的接收方式，情绪和动机变化的作用（特别参考社会情绪选择理论），以及可能影响对晚年赌博过程中决策的理解的自传体记忆的变化。通过建立在 Brand 和 Markowitsch 提到的与老年人决策相关的认知和情感过程的基础上，我们的批评强调了这个重要领域未来研究的途径。
