Adolescence is often viewed as a time of irrational, risky decision-making - despite adolescents' competence in other cognitive domains. In this study, we examined the strategies used by adolescents (N=30) and young adults (N=47) to resolve complex, multi-outcome economic gambles. Compared to adults, adolescents were more likely to make conservative, loss-minimizing choices consistent with economic models. Eye-tracking data showed that prior to decisions, adolescents acquired more information in a more thorough manner; that is, they engaged in a more analytic processing strategy indicative of trade-offs between decision variables. In contrast, young adults' decisions were more consistent with heuristics that simplified the decision problem, at the expense of analytic precision. Collectively, these results demonstrate a counter-intuitive developmental transition in economic decision making: adolescents' decisions are more consistent with rational-choice models, while young adults more readily engage task-appropriate heuristics.

中文翻译：

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理性青少年：眼动追踪揭示的决策过程中的战略信息处理

尽管青少年在其他认知领域有能力，但青春期通常被视为非理性、冒险决策的时期。在这项研究中，我们研究了青少年 (N=30) 和年轻人 (N=47) 用来解决复杂的、多结果的经济赌博的策略。与成年人相比，青少年更有可能做出与经济模型一致的保守的、损失最小的选择。眼动追踪数据显示，在做出决定之前，青少年以更彻底的方式获取了更多信息；也就是说，他们采用了一种更具分析性的处理策略，表明决策变量之间的权衡。相比之下，年轻人的决策更符合简化决策问题的启发式方法，但会牺牲分析精度。总的来说，