Intertemporal Choice as Discounted Value Accumulation

Intertemporal Choice as Discounted Value Accumulation

Two separate cognitive processes are involved in choosing between rewards available at different points in time. The first is temporal discounting, which consists of combining information about the size and delay of prospective rewards to represent subjective values. The second involves a comparison of available rewards to enable an eventual choice on the basis of these subjective values. While...

The neural basis of value accumulation in intertemporal choice.

Making intertemporal choices (choosing between rewards available at different points in time) requires determining and comparing the subjective values of available rewards. Several studies have found converging evidence identifying the neural systems that encode subjective value in intertemporal choice. However, the neural mechanisms responsible for the process that produces intertemporal decis...

Prefrontal Coding of Temporally Discounted Values during Intertemporal Choice

Reward from a particular action is seldom immediate, and the influence of such delayed outcome on choice decreases with delay. It has been postulated that when faced with immediate and delayed rewards, decision makers choose the option with maximum temporally discounted value. We examined the preference of monkeys for delayed reward in an intertemporal choice task and the neural basis for real-...

Simulating future value in intertemporal choice

The laboratory study of how humans and other animals trade-off value and time has a long and storied history, and is the subject of a vast literature. However, despite a long history of study, there is no agreed upon mechanistic explanation of how intertemporal choice preferences arise. Several theorists have recently proposed model-based reinforcement learning as a candidate framework. This fr...

Intertemporal Choice