Whether animal studies can inform human studies depends on answers to the following questions. Subjects may only have implicit knowledge of the map, which likely engage distinct neural substrates to the explicit processes engaged by humans when considering a verbal offer ( Reber et al., 2003 Poldrack et al., 2001). Subjects experience the cues, delays and rewards, and slowly build an internal map from the cues to the delays and magnitudes. if the payout is in 6 months) the human subjects go about their lives, likely forgetting about the delayed payment, just as individuals do not actively think about their retirement savings account each moment until their retirement.Īnimal studies of delay-discounting take several forms ( Dalley et al., 2011 Redish et al., 2008 Cai et al., 2011 Wikenheiser et al., 2013), but all require experiential learning that some non-verbal cue is associated with waiting. (We are aware of only a handful of studies that have used delays of minutes ( McClure et al., 2007) or seconds ( Lane et al., 2003 Gregorios-Pippas et al., 2009 Prevost et al., 2010 Tanaka et al., 2014 Fung et al., 2017)). In human studies, subjects usually make a series of choices (either via computer or a survey, often hypothetical) between smaller sooner and larger offers delayed by months or years ( McClure et al., 2004 Andersen et al., 2014). Generally, there is nothing for the subject to do during this waiting period. In animal studies, subjects experience the delay between their choice and the reward (sometimes cued with a ramping sound or a diminishing visual stimulus) before they can proceed to the next trial ( Cai et al., 2011 Blanchard et al., 2013 Tedford et al., 2015). Since research has found that intertemporal preferences are predictive of a wide variety of important life outcomes, ranging from SAT scores, graduating from college, and income to anti-social behaviors, for example gambling or drug abuse ( Frederick et al., 2002 Madden and Bickel, 2010 Casey et al., 2011 Golsteyn et al., 2014 Åkerlund et al., 2016), they are frequently studied in both humans and animals across multiple disciplines, including marketing, economics, psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience.Ī potential obstacle to understanding the biological basis of intertemporal decision-making is that human studies differ from non-human animal studies in two important ways: long versus short time-horizons and choices that are made based on verbal versus non-verbal (i.e. Many individual decisions have this temporal structure, such as whether to purchase a cheaper refrigerator, but forgo the ongoing energy savings. Intertemporal choices involve a trade-off between a larger outcome received later and a smaller outcome received sooner. The Reviewing Editor's assessment is that all the issues have been addressed (see decision letter). Taken together, this indicates that individuals have a stable, but context-dependent, time-preference that can be reliably assessed using different methods, providing a foundation to bridge studies of time-preferences across species.Įditorial note: This article has been through an editorial process in which the authors decide how to respond to the issues raised during peer review. Yet, discount factors scaled dramatically across the tasks, indicating a strong effect of temporal context. We found that the ranks of subjects’ time-preferences were reliable across both verbal/experiential and second/day differences. To bridge these divides, we developed a novel language-free experiential task inspired by animal decision-making studies. Human studies present long time-horizon options verbally, whereas animal studies employ experiential cues and short delays. However, two major methodological differences hinder comparing results across species. As such, delay-discounting has been extensively studied by economists, psychologists and neuroscientists to reveal its behavioral and biological mechanisms in both human and non-human animal models. Individual differences in delay-discounting correlate with important real world outcomes, for example education, income, drug use, and criminality.
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