2017 Pilot Grants

 

Social Reward and Aging: Identifying the Neural Underpinnings of Peer Influences

DAVID SMITH (TEMPLE PSYCHOLOGY), DOMINIC FARERI (ADELPHI PSYCHOLOGY), GIOVANNETTI (TEMPLE PSYCHOLOGY), REECK (TEMPLE MARKETING)

Close relationships have powerful influences over our lives, supporting physical and emotional well-being and fulfilling social needs to connect. Interactions with close others drive many decisions by altering the value placed on the outcomes of choices (e.g., choosing healthy vs. unhealthy eating habits). Recent evidence indicates that the social context created by the presence of a friend enhances responses within the brain’s reward circuit and influences collaborative decisions in young adults. Yet, it remains unclear whether reward-enhancing effects of close relationships change between younger and older adulthood. Such changes could have important implications for both understanding the nature of social influence on decision making across the lifespan and crafting social interventions to improve social decisions in older adulthood. This proposal will assess age-related changes in reward-enhancing effects of close relationships. Fifty participants (25 young adults, ages 20-35; 25 older adults, ages 65-80) will participate in two neuroimaging tasks adapted from our prior work investigating the effects of close relationships on social reward processes—an economic trust game and a simple card guessing game for shared monetary rewards. Participants will play both games with three partners: a close friend; a stranger (confederate); and a computer (non-social control). We hypothesize that older adults will exhibit enhanced reward-related responses (compared to young adults) within the striatum in response to reciprocity and shared monetary rewards with a close friend relative to other partners, which will be tied to increased connectivity between the default-mode network and the striatum. We expect variability in relationship quality (e.g., social closeness) will moderate these neural patterns. Critically, based on evidence suggesting an increased vulnerability to fraud in older adults, we also anticipate that older adults will demonstrate an increased propensity to trust strangers, suggesting an altered ability to integrate enhancements of positive experiences selectively within close relationships. Such results would suggest that the effects of social relationships on the neural representations of rewarding social experiences become more potent with age, while the ability to integrate these signals into adaptive behavior may be impaired.

 

Interactions of Motivational Incentives and Cognitive Control in Older Adult Decision-Making

DEBBIE YEE (WASHU PSYCHOLOGICAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES), TODD BRAVER (WASHU PSYCHOLOGICAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES, RADIOLOGY), LEONARD GREEN (WASHU PSYCHOLOGICAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES), CAMILLO PADOA-SCHIOPPA (WASHU NEUROSCIENCE, ECONOMICS, BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING), JOSHUA J JACKSON (WASHU PSYCHOLOGICAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES)

This project focuses on the role of motivation and cognitive control in mediating changes in the psychological and neural mechanisms of older adult decision-making. Converging evidence suggests that many age-related changes in behavior can be attributed to a decline in older adults’ abilities to exert cognitive control over thoughts and actions, and a putative core problem in cognitive aging may be impairment in goal maintenance and proactive control. Other theoretical frameworks have suggested that age-related affective changes motivational reprioritization among older adults, though virtually no work has been done to explore the neural mechanisms that contribute to age-related changes in motivational processes. The primary aim will be to examine age differences in cognitive control mechanisms that enable motivational integration of primary and secondary incentives (e.g., money, liquids). We hypothesize that older adults’ decisions to engage in cognitively effortful control strategies will be less sensitive to the motivational value of the current task context, particularly when value estimation depends on incentive integration. To test this hypothesis, we utilize a powerful novel experimental paradigm that is cognitively demanding and more resembles the realistic and complex decisions older adult perform in daily life. Thus, we aim to identify the core neural mechanisms underlying age-related changes in motivational and cognitive control processes (both independently and their interaction), which will have translational relevance towards a more comprehensive understanding of older adult decision-making.

Publications:
Yee DM, Crawford JL, Lamichhane B, Braver TS. Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex Encodes the Integrated Incentive Motivational Value of Cognitive Task Performance. J Neurosci. 2021;41(16):3707-3720. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2550-20.2021

Crawford, J. L., Yee, D. M., Hallenbeck, H. W., Naumann, A., Shapiro, K., Thompson, R. J., & Braver, T. S. (2020). Dissociable effects of monetary, liquid, and social incentives on motivation and cognitive control. Frontiers in psychology, 11, 2212.

Yee, Debbie, “Neural Mechanisms of Motivational Incentive Integration and Cognitive Control” (2019). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1969. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/1969

Yee, D.M., Adams, S., Beck, A. et al. Age-Related Differences in Motivational Integration and Cognitive Control. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci 19, 692–714 (2019). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-019-00713-3

Yee, D. M., & Braver, T. S. (2018). Interactions of motivation and cognitive control. Current opinion in behavioral sciences, 19, 83-90.

 

Effects of Episodic Memory Retrieval on Intertemporal Choice in Cognitively Normal Older Adults

KAROLINA LEMPERT (PENN MEMORY CENTER), JOSEPH KABLE (PENN PSYCHOLOGY), DAVID WOLK (PENN NEUROLOGY)

When making choices between outcomes realized at different times (intertemporal choices), people prefer rewards sooner rather than later, even when the delayed reward is larger. This tendency, temporal discounting, varies widely across individuals. Determining the neural mechanisms that underlie temporal discounting is important because overly myopic choices can be detrimental to people’s health and well-being. Understanding intertemporal choice in aging is especially important, as older adults face many critical intertemporal decisions (e.g., retirement and estate planning, medical decisions). There is some evidence that the episodic memory system plays a role in promoting more patient choice: cues that trigger episodic thinking (about the future or the past) prior to intertemporal choice reduce temporal discounting. The mechanism by which this occurs is unclear, however. It could be that episodic richness drives more patient choice, but it could also be due to other factors, such as positive affect. In this project, we probe for this mechanism by turning to a population marked by decline in episodic memory richness, and variability in this decline: older adults. Here we test if episodic recall (autobiographical memory retrieval) prior to intertemporal choice reduces temporal discounting in older adults. We also investigate the neural mechanism by which memory retrieval impacts choice, and the extent to which episodic memory ability predicts the size of the behavioral effect. This research will contribute to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying intertemporal choice, and it may inspire novel interventions for fostering patient choice.