• Risk-taking is a multifactorial construct that can be dissociated into economic risk and ambiguity, each supported by distinct neural mechanisms. How ambiguity aversion develops over adolescence remains largely unknown. Ambiguity relate to everyday risk-taking in different ways. We propose renewed focus on research adolescent risk-taking. Popular culture often portrays as period of peak risk-...

A heightened propensity for risk-taking and poor decision-making underlies the peak morbidity and mortality rates reported during adolescence. Delayed maturation of cortical structures during the adolescent years has been proposed as a possible explanation for this observation. Here, we test the hypothesis of adolescent delayed maturation by using fMRI during a monetary decision-making task tha...

Despite the graying of the world population and increasing relevance of decision competence across the life span, scant research has focused on whether or how reward processing and risky decision making may change across adulthood. Here, we review studies that have examined how age influences psychological and neural responses to financial incentives and risk. The findings suggest that while pr...

The relationship between the use of cannabis and the decision-making processes was explored. A computerized version of the Iowa Gambling Task (Cards Software) in its normal and reverse version was used, and the Prospect Valence Learning (PVL) model, which characterize the process of decision-making based on the parameters: Recency, Consistency, Loss aversion and Utility shape, was applied. Seve...

Chronic cannabis users are known to be impaired on a test of decision-making, the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Computational models of the psychological processes underlying this impairment have the potential to provide a rich description of the psychological characteristics of poor performers within particular clinical groups. We used two computational models of IGT performance, the Expectancy-Va...

Every day, people face snap decisions when time is a limiting factor. In addition, the way a problem is presented can influence people's choices, which creates what are known as framing effects. In this research, we explored how time pressure interacts with framing effects in risky decision making. Specifically, does time pressure strengthen or weaken framing effects? On one hand, research has ...

OBJECTIVE Studies have shown that increasing patient participation in decision making decreases utilization of risky procedures. It has been demonstrated that risk perception is increased under conditions that emphasize volition, or the act of choosing. The objective of this study was to examine whether emphasizing volition increases patients' risk perception and decreases their willingness to ...

I n the aftermath of many natural and man-made disasters, people often wonder why those affected were underprepared, especially when the disaster was the result of known or regularly occurring hazards (e.g., hurricanes). We study one contributing factor: prior near-miss experiences. Near misses are events that have some nontrivial expectation of ending in disaster but, by chance, do not. We dem...