Abstract:

The world is aging at its fastest rate ever. There are raising concerns on older adults’ cognitive declining. The effects of aging on decision-making becomes one new focus recent years. Recent studies on decision-making from the aspects of physiological aging, pathological aging and its brain mechanisms showed that normal aging demonstrated impaired decision-making under ambiguity but intact decision-making under risk, whereas the pathological aging individuals, like Alzheimer’s disease patients, demonstrated impairment of both kinds of decision-making on behaviors and brain functions. Future research needs to use multiple measures of decision-making in the same study and to combine both peripheral and central measures to investigate the aging effect on the behavior and neuro-circuits of decision-making.

Key words: decision-making, aging, neurodegenerative diseases, Alzheimer’s disease, funcational magnetic resonance imaging