When Smaller Sooner Depletes a Pool of Resources Faster.

Behavior has short-term (proximal) and long-term (distal) consequences, and these consequences often involve different commodities. In particular, a commonly encountered distal consequence involves running out of resources - energy to respond, available food, ammunition, or money in the bank - that must be replenished before continuing a rewarding task. The current project examines proximal behavioral consequences in a video game (the amount of damage done to a clicked-on target as a function of waiting) and distal behavioral consequences (running out of the resources that allow the player to click on a target).

Resource limitations: A taxonomy.

Decision making within the context of resource limitations requires balancing the short-term benefits of obtaining a resource and the long-term consequences of depleting those resources. The present manuscript focuses on four types of tasks that share this tradeoff to develop a taxonomy that will encourage a deeper understanding of the psychological processes at play. The four types considered are foraging, common pool traps, deterioration traps, and a novel designation referred to as resource cliffs.

The effects of sound in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task.

In this study, we examined the effects of pairing sounds with positive and negative outcomes in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART). A number of published studies using the BART incorporate sounds into the task, where a slot machine or cash register sound is produced when rewards are collected and a popping sound is produced when balloons pop. However, some studies do not use sound, and other studies do not specify whether sound was used.

Learning when to wait and when to act.

Choosing how long to wait in order to optimize reward is a complex decision. We embedded these decisions within a video-game environment in which the amount of reward smoothly increased the longer one waited. The availability of external cues varied in order to determine how they affected the decision to wait to achieve the goal of maximizing the reward rate.

A New Analysis on Self-Control in Intertemporal Choice and Mediterranean Dietary Pattern.

This paper completes Muñoz Torrecillas et al. (1) results and conclusions investigating the relationship between adherence to healthy dietary habits, specifically the Mediterranean Diet (hereinafter, MD), and impulsivity in intertemporal choices. Impulsivity can be defined as the strong preference for small immediate payoffs over larger delayed payoffs, and in the original study this behavior was captured by the parameter (discount rate of the hyperbolic discount function), calculated using an automated scoring mechanism.