Decision making in the aging brain: An update of the evidence base for the ‘affect-integration-motivation’ framework

Individuals’ goals and motivations change across their life spans, which may affect decision making as individuals perceive a dwindling number of opportunities to compensate for negative consequences or other losses. Moreover, with advancing age, changes are also occurring at the biological level, including brain structure and function. This may bring about age differences in the cognitive and affective decision-making processes. To advance systematic neuroeconomic research, Samanez-Larkin and Knutson proposed the influential Affect-Integration-Motivation (AIM) Framework almost ten years ago, which described the brain circuits supporting the affective and motivational processes that influence decision making (Samanez-Larkin & Knutson, 2015). Crucially, they explained how age-related changes to these circuits could impact older adults' decision making. This chapter will serve as an update to this seminal paper. In the first part of the chapter, we briefly review the AIM framework before providing an updated literature review describing age-related changes in these associated brain circuits and how these changes impact decision making with age. In the second part, we identify some main gaps in extant work and outline approaches to close them.