# Intact reinforcement learning in healthy ageing

## TL;DR

Older adults can perform complex reinforcement learning tasks as well as younger adults after sufficient practice, suggesting that cognitive abilities remain largely intact with age.

## Contribution

The study shows that higher-level cognitive tasks like navigation-based reinforcement learning remain intact in healthy aging.

## Key findings

- Older adults initially performed less efficiently in a complex navigation task.
- With sufficient trials, older adults matched the performance of young adults.
- Results suggest that aging does not universally impair reinforcement learning.

## Abstract

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.

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00221-025-07092-x.