Time Discounting for Primary Rewards

By Samuel M. McClure, Keith M. Marzilli Ericson, David Laibson, George Loewenstein, J. Cohen. Journal of Neuroscience, 2007

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Previous research, involving monetary rewards, found that limbic reward-related areas show greater activity when an intertemporal choice includes an immediate reward than when the options include only delayed rewards. In contrast, the lateral prefrontal and parietal cortex (areas commonly associated with deliberative cognitive processes, including future planning) respond to intertemporal choices in general but do not exhibit sensitivity to immediacy (McClure et al., 2004). The current experiments extend these findings to primary rewards (fruit juice or water) and time delays of minutes instead of weeks. Thirsty subjects choose between small volumes of drinks delivered at precise times during the experiment (e.g., 2 ml now vs 3 ml in 5 min). Consistent with previous findings, limbic activation was greater for choices between an immediate reward and a delayed reward than for choices between two delayed rewards, whereas the lateral prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex responded similarly whether choices were between an immediate and a delayed reward or between two delayed rewards. Moreover, relative activation of the two sets of brain regions predicts actual choice behavior. A second experiment finds that when the delivery of all rewards is offset by 10 min (so that the earliest available juice reward in any choice is 10 min), no differential activity is observed in limbic reward-related areas for choices involving the earliest versus only more delayed rewards. We discuss implications of this finding for differences between primary and secondary rewards.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1c734c6f1b799f1fea0e679cb0224f996d91f19e

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Citations in the corpus

Using Incentives to Encourage Healthy Eating in Children (2013, background): “Notes: Each bar is a separate school and the schools are grouped based on the treatment they received.”
Episodic future thinking reduces reward delay discounting through an enhancement of prefrontal-mediotemporal interactions. (2010, methodology): “…effects in the DLPFC and ACC mostly reflect differences in parametric value effects between conditions, whereas the ''d-areas'' from the b-d model (McClure et al., 2004, 2007) and the self-control areas in lateral PFC (Figner et al., 2010; Hare et al., 2009) have been identified using categorical…”
NEUROECONOMICS: A CRITICAL RECONSIDERATION (2008, background): “This hypothesis suggests to McClure et al. (2004, 2007) that there could be different parts of the brain activated when considering d = 0 choices and d > 0 choices.”
Choice, uncertainty and value in prefrontal and cingulate cortex (2008, background): “Several fMRI studies have sought correlates of the discount term, reporting activity in lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) and OF”
The Reward Circuit: Linking Primate Anatomy and Human Imaging (2010, background): “Initial FMRI studies found evidence that VS activation increased when immediate vs delayed rewards were considered and decreased with the delay of future rewards (Kable and Glimcher, 2007; McClure et al , 2007; McClure et al , 2004a).”
Functional imaging studies of emotion regulation: A synthetic review and evolving model of the cognitive control of emotion (2012, neutral): “This same logic applies to studies of intertemporal choice and delay of gratification 158 where imaging 159, 160 and TMS 161 studies suggest that lateral PFC control systems can be used to effortfully represent the value of a larger delayed reward and guide selection of it over a smaller but…”