BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that cognitive function is negatively associated with temporal discounting in old age. METHODS Participants were 388 community-dwelling older persons without dementia from the Rush Memory and Aging Project, an ongoing longitudinal epidemiologic study of aging in the Chicago metropolitan area. Temporal discounting was measured u...

BACKGROUND Excessive discounting of future rewards has been observed in a variety of disorders and has been linked both to valuation of the past and to memory of past events. METHODS To explore the functionality of discounting and memory, we examined whether training of working memory would result in less discounting of future rewards. In this study, 27 adults in treatment for stimulant use w...

Controversies about time discounting loom large in decisions about climate change. Prominently, a particularly controversial debate about time discounting in climate change decision-making has been conducted within climate economics, between the authors of Stern et al. (Stern review on the economics of climate change, 2006) and their critics (most prominently Dasgupta in Comments on the Stern r...

Studies of delay discounting typically have involved choices between smaller, immediate outcomes and larger, delayed outcomes. In a study of delay discounting in humans, Green et al. (2005) added a period of time prior to both outcomes, creating a delay common to both. They found that the subjective value of the more delayed reward was well described by a hyperboloid discounting function and th...

Delay discounting-often referred to as hyperbolic discounting in the financial literature-is defined by a consistent preference for smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards, and by failure of future consequences to curtail current consummatory behaviors. Previous research demonstrates (1) excessive delay discounting among individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder ...

The value of a reinforcer decreases as the time until its receipt increases, a phenomenon referred to as delay discounting. Although delay discounting of non-drug reinforcers has been studied extensively in a number of species, our knowledge of discounting in non-human primates is limited. In the present study, rhesus monkeys were allowed to choose in discrete trials between 0.05% saccharin del...

Sources providing information about the value of a variable may not be totally reliable. In such a case, it is common in uncertainty theories to take account of this unreliability by a so-called discounting rule. A few discounting rules have been proposed in the framework of imprecise probability theory, but one of the drawback of those rules is that they do not preserve interesting properties ...

This study investigated the influence of executive working memory (EWM) capacity on impulsive decision-making in a sample of young adults (n=623) that varied in degree of externalizing psychopathology (EXT) by examining: (i) the effects of WM load on delay discounting rates, and, (ii) the association between EWM capacity and delay discounting rates. EXT was measured as a latent variable indicat...

Some current theories of probabilistic categorization assume that people gradually attenuate their learning in response to unavoidable error. However, existing evidence for this error discounting is sparse and open to alternative interpretations. We report two probabilistic-categorization experiments that investigated error discounting by shifting feedback probabilities to new values after diff...

The present paper addresses the question of the form of the mathematical relation between the time until a delayed reward and its present value. Data are presented from an experiment in which subjects chose between hypothetical amounts of money available either immediately or after a delay (Green, Fry, & Myerson, 1994). Analyses of the behavior of individual young adults demonstrated that tempo...