How episodic memory drives older adults' decision-making under gain and loss contexts

Older adults often suffer from financial exploitations due to impaired decision-making. Meanwhile, older adults exhibit declined episodic memory in terms of lower recognition and associative memories compared with younger adults. An interesting yet unanswered question is whether there is a direct impact of age-related memory impairment on older adults' decision-making, especially under gain and loss contexts. In the present study, younger and older adults played an investment game in which they learned that some agent faces from an investment institution helped them gain money and some made them lose money. In a subsequent decision-making phase, they chose between different agents to achieve gains and avoid losses, and finally their memories were tested. Older adults showed poorer associative memory than younger adults, which led to their lower decision-making performance than younger adults regardless of gain/loss contexts, showing a symmetric aging effect of decision-making impairment under gain and loss contexts. Critically, we found that associative memory drove older adults' decision-making less efficiently as it did for younger adults in both gain and loss contexts. These results provide supporting evidence for the associative deficit hypothesis and a dissociation between episodic memory and decision-making in older adults. Hence, our study has uncovered potential mnemonic mechanisms underlying older adults' financial decision-making deficiency. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).