June 1, 2010 Just because your mother has turned 85, you
shouldn't assume you'll have to take over her financial matters.
She may be just as good or better than you at making quick,
sound, money-making decisions, according to researchers at Duke
University. "It's not age, it's cognition that makes the
difference in decision-making," said Scott Huettel, Ph.D.,
Associate Professor of psychology and neuroscience and director
of the Duke Center for Neuroeconomic Studies. He recently led a
laboratory study in which participants could gain or lose money
based on their decisions. "Once we accounted for cognitive
abilities like memory and processing speed, age had nothing to
do with predicting whether an individual would make the best
economic decisions on the tasks we assigned," Huettel said. The
study was published in the Psychology and Aging journal,
published by the American Psychological Association. Duke
researchers assigned a variety of economic tasks that required
different types of risky decisions, so that p