Validating Habitual and Goal-Directed Decision-Making Performance Online in Healthy Older Adults

Everyday decision-making is supported by a dual-system of control comprised of parallel goal-directed and habitual systems. Over the past decade, the two-stage Markov decision task has become popularized for its ability to dissociate between goal-directed and habitual decision-making. While a handful of studies have implemented decision-making tasks online, only one study has validated the task by comparing in-person and web-based performance on the two-stage task in children and young adults. To date, no study has validated the dissociation of goal-directed and habitual behaviors in older adults online. Here, we implemented and validated a web-based version of the two-stage Markov task usi…