Intact reinforcement learning in healthy ageing

What changes with age? Results in reinforcement learning (RL) are mixed. Some studies found deteriorated RL performance in older participants compared to younger controls whereas other studies did not. Daniel et al. (J Neurosci 40(5):1084–1096, 2020. 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0254-19.2019) suggested that task demand can explain these differences, with less demanding tasks showing no effect of age. Compared to classic, simple RL tasks, we used a navigation task to increase overall complexity. We found that older adults performed less efficiently initially; however, with sufficient trials, they performed as well as young adults. Our results support the idea that ageing does not universally impair performance and that even higher-level cognitive tasks remain largely intact.