Delay of gratification (DofG) refers to the capacity to forego an immediate reward in order to receive a more desirable reward later. As a core executive function, it might be expected that DofG would follow the standard pattern of age-related decline observed in older adults for other executive tasks. However, there actually have been few studies of aging and DofG, and even these have shown mixed results, suggesting the need for further investigation and new approaches. The present study tested a novel reward-based decision-making paradigm enabling examination of age-related DofG effects in adult humans. Results showed that older adults earned fewer overall rewards than young adults, both before and after instruction regarding the optimal DofG strategy. Prior to instruction, learning this strategy was challenging for all participants, regardless of age. The finding of age-related impairments even after strategy instruction indicated that these impairments were not due to a failure to understand the task or follow the optimal strategy, but instead were related to self-reported difficulty in waiting for delayed rewards. These results suggest the presence of age-related changes in DofG capacity and highlight the advantages of this new experimental paradigm for use in future investigations, including both behavioral and neuroimaging studies.

中文翻译：

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健康老龄化中延迟满足的研究

延迟满足（DofG）是指为了以后获得更理想的奖励而放弃即时奖励的能力。作为一项核心执行功能，可以预期 DofG 将遵循在老年人中观察到的其他执行任务与年龄相关的下降的标准模式。然而，实际上很少有关于衰老和 DofG 的研究，即使这些研究也显示出不同的结果，这表明需要进一步研究和新方法。本研究测试了一种新的基于奖励的决策范式，该范式能够检查成人中与年龄相关的 DofG 效应。结果表明，在关于最佳 DofG 策略的指导之前和之后，老年人获得的总体奖励比年轻人少。在接受指导之前，学习这个策略对所有参与者来说都是一个挑战，不论年纪。即使在策略指导之后，年龄相关的障碍的发现表明这些障碍不是由于未能理解任务或未能遵循最佳策略，而是与自我报告的等待延迟奖励的困难有关。这些结果表明 DofG 能力存在与年龄相关的变化，并突出了这种新实验范式的优势，可用于未来的研究，包括行为和神经影像学研究。