A short-form decision-making task preserving value-based choices and their relationship to apathy in older adults

Apathy, or diminished motivation, is increasingly understood as reflecting biases in value-based decision-making. The Everyday Choice Task offers an ecologically grounded setting for investigating this relationship. In this task, older adults rate everyday activities on 19 different value attributes, and then make choices between pairs of activities. Prior analyses of these value attributes recover three main value dimensions (effort, reward, and obligation) that significantly predict choice behavior, while overweighting of effort during choice is selectively associated with apathy. In this study, we tested whether a brief version of the task, inquiring about these three dimensions directly rather than using the full set of attributes, would preserve relationships between value, choice, and apathy observed using the original instrument. Older adults (n = 110) completed both the original and brief versions of the task in a randomized order, along with the Apathy Motivation Index. Ratings of effort, reward, and obligation derived from the original and brief versions of the task were strongly correlated. In both versions of the task, ratings of effort, reward, and obligation significantly predicted choice, and greater apathy severity was associated with a selective overweighting of effort. These findings support the use of the brief Everyday Choice Task as an efficient measure of value-based decision-making in future research.