Adolescents often help to make risky and impulsive decisions. with the lower risk and return as the disparity in risk between the two options improved. These findings demonstrate obvious age-related variations in economic risk preferences that vary with choice arranged and risk. Importantly, adolescence appears to represent an intermediate decision-making phenotype along the transition from child years to adulthood, rather than an age of heightened preference for economic risk. (Casey et al., 2010). Experimental studies of risk preference have generally found that children and adolescents are less risk-averse than adults (Harbaugh et al., 2002; Levin and Hart, 2003; Levin et al., 2007a; Burnett et al., 2010; Rakow and Rahim, 2010; for review observe Boyer, 2006), but contextual variations sometimes elicit different age-related patterns (Figner et al., 2009). For example, in choosing between a sure bet and a gamble of equivalent expected value (EV), young children tend to select risky options more often than adults (Harbaugh et al., 2002; Levin and Hart, 2003). In the Columbia Cards Task, in which successive cards flips increase the probability of encountering a risk cards and threaten cumulative winnings, adolescents choose more risky options compared to GDC-0068 adults (Figner et al., 2009). Burnett et al. (2010) used a two-spinner task in which both the probability and the payoff for winning were manipulated. They found that adolescents showed more willingness to make risky choices C defined as preference for the spinner with higher variance, unique from EV C compared to pre-adolescent children (9-years-old and older) and young adults. Yet, heightened preference for risky options amongst adolescents has not been demonstrated consistently across studies. When the Columbia Cards task is definitely revised so that participants preselect a number of cards to flip, adolescents made similar choices to adults (Figner et al., 2009). In another study, vehicle Leijenhorst et al. (2010) offered participants aged 8- to 26-years-old with choices between a 66% chance of winning one Euro and a 33% chance of winning either 2, 4, 6, or 8 Euros. Risk preference decreased with age in the 2 2 Euro condition and did not vary with age in GDC-0068 the additional three conditions. Therefore different studies have revealed either a developmental increase in risk aversion or a U-shaped tendency in risk aversion. GDC-0068 It is unclear which task guidelines may be responsible for these two different age-related styles. In the current study, we characterize the development of risk preference by systematically and individually manipulating risk and EV. AKAP10 A key feature of our approach that differs from prior work on this topic is that we use a non-symbolic task that was designed to avoid symbolic math knowledge and complex rule learning, which are both stumbling blocks for young children. This differs from most prior studies of adolescent choice, which typically use economic jobs (Reyna and Ellis, 1994; vehicle Leijenhorst et al., 2006; Crone et al., 2008; Burnett et al., 2010; vehicle Leijenhorst et al., 2010). Yet, even across laboratory studies, there is a lack of regularity in meanings of risk: a choice may be risky if it is for maximizing benefits in the long run, or it may be risky if it offers higher variability in results compared to alternatives. Therefore we operationally define risk as the coefficient of variance (CV) in the potential outcomes of risky choice, while keeping CV and EV orthogonal over the course of the experiment. The CV is definitely a dimensionless representation of risk per unit of return, affording comparisons across jobs that use different devices. CV offers been shown to outperform more traditional economic actions of risk (e.g., variance) in explaining choice behavior in a range of varieties (Weber et al., 2004). Finally, because of inconsistencies in the literature as to whether risk preference shows a reducing tendency over development or an inverted U-shaped tendency (Weller et al., in press), we tested a wide age span with three age groups: young children (6- to 8-years-old), adolescents (15- to 16-years-old), and young adults (18- to 32-years-old). Our task consisted of three different decision-making trial types, which are illustrated in Number ?Number1.1. RiskCSafe tests required.