Variability in Nucleus Accumbens Activity Mediates Age-Related Suboptimal Financial Risk Taking

As human life expectancy continues to rise, financial decisions of aging investors may have an increasing impact on the global economy. In this study, we examined age differences in financial decisions across the adult life span by combining functional neuroimaging with a dynamic financial investment task. During the task, older adults made more suboptimal choices than younger adults when choosing risky assets. This age-related effect was mediated by a neural measure of temporal variability in nucleus accumbens activity. These findings reveal a novel neural mechanism by which aging may disrupt rational financial choice.

• Publication year

  2010

• Venue

  Journal of Neuroscience

• Publication date

  2010-01-27

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4902-09.2010PMID 20107069PMCID PMC2821055
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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