Meredith Caudill

Education: Majoring in Psychology and Philosophy
Mentor: Michael Young, Ph.D.
Project: Age-Related Differences in Impulsivity and Waiting Behavior: an Examination of Decision-Making using an Escalating Interest Task

Impulsivity, defined as a tendency to act without sufficient consideration of future consequences, is a multifaceted construct with significant implications for real-world decision-making. While its adaptive role and developmental trajectory across the adult lifespan remain underexplored in dynamic, experiential contexts, this study investigated age-related differences in impulsivity using an online experiential escalating interest task (EIT) designed as a fishing game. Our sample consisted of 98 U.S.-based participants (49 F, 48 M, 1 Other) aged 18-65. The mean age of the participants was 38 (SD = 14). In this task, participants decided when to "reel in" an accumulating reward over 10-second trials with varying reward growth functions ("power" values). We measured inter-response times (IRTs), reflecting waiting, and total points accumulated, indicating overall task performance. We hypothesized that older adults would exhibit lower impulsivity (longer IRTs), show greater sensitivity to "power" values, and achieve higher task performance compared to younger adults, with emerging adults showing greater IRT variability. Results showed participants were highly sensitive to "power" values, with higher power leading to shorter waiting times. However, age did not significantly predict overall waiting or optimal task performance. Contrary to our hypothesis, older adults exhibited greater variability in their IRTs compared to younger adults (p = .012). These findings suggest that in dynamic, experiential tasks like the EIT, age may not lead to significant linear changes in average impulsivity or optimality, but rather to increased variability in decision-making in older age. This highlights the importance of using experiential paradigms to understand the nuanced developmental patterns of impulsivity.