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Updated: Sep 16, 2025

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Intact reinforcement learning in healthy ageing.

Wei-Hsiang Lin1, Karin S Pilz2, Michael H Herzog3

  • 1Laboratory of Psychophysics, Brain Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. weishung1@gmail.com.

Experimental Brain Research
|July 11, 2025
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Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Ageing does not universally impair cognitive performance. Older adults showed initial inefficiency in complex navigation tasks but performed comparably to younger adults with sufficient practice.

Keywords:
AgeingBehaviorLearningReinforcement learning

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive neuroscience
  • Neuroscience of aging
  • Behavioral neuroscience

Background:

  • Reinforcement learning (RL) performance in older adults is inconsistent across studies.
  • Previous research suggests task complexity may explain age-related differences in RL.
  • Older adults may exhibit preserved cognitive functions in more complex scenarios.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the impact of age on reinforcement learning in a complex navigation task.
  • To determine if increased task complexity influences age-related performance differences in RL.
  • To examine whether higher-level cognitive functions remain intact in older adults.

Main Methods:

  • Employed a complex navigation task, distinct from simpler RL paradigms.
  • Compared the performance of older adults to younger adults.
  • Analyzed performance efficiency over a sufficient number of trials.

Main Results:

  • Older adults initially demonstrated less efficient performance in the navigation task.
  • With adequate trial experience, older adults' performance became comparable to that of younger adults.
  • The findings suggest that age does not universally impair cognitive abilities.

Conclusions:

  • Ageing does not necessarily lead to a decline in reinforcement learning capabilities, especially in complex tasks.
  • Higher-level cognitive functions, such as those involved in navigation and learning, appear largely preserved in older age.
  • Task complexity and learning opportunities are critical factors in understanding age-related cognitive performance.