What are you avoiding? Age‐related effects of risk and reward on cognitive effort‐based decision‐making

Obtained findings were partially consistent with our hypotheses as both age groups exhibited greater cognitive effort in pursuit of rewards and risk aversion was only slightly higher in OAs vs. YAs, while greater effort expenditure (on reward trials only) was counterintuitively related to greater self-reported symptoms of mental effort avoidance and mood. While the concept of decisional inertia may help to contextualize our findings, such potential confounds will need to be explored in our future work.