2021

Neuroscientific research on decision making and aging has focused almost exclusively on monetary incentives. Despite evidence for intact processing of and motivation by monetary gains in old age, preserved function does not extend to learning-based decision making where these incentives must be applied. Here older adults learn more slowly from monetary gains and losses compared to younger adults.

This pilot will assess the use of data from a commercial consumer database on all households in the U.S. to construct reliable measures of the volatility of household income. If successful, the resulting data will be used to assess the relationships between income volatility and mortality in the U.S. and how that relationship varies by race/ethnicity, age and gender of heads of households in the U.S. Study of the latter relationship has been hampered by the lack of availability of samples of households in the U.S.