Delayed monetary losses: Do different procedures and discounting measures assess the same construct?

The present study examined two procedures for assessing the discounting of delayed, hypothetical, monetary losses: the Adjusting-Amount procedure (Estle et al., 2006) and the Delayed Losses Questionnaire (Myerson et al., 2017), which was modeled on Kirby et al.

Individual differences in the discounting of combination outcomes in which immediate gains are followed by delayed losses.

The vast majority of studies on discounting have focused on simple delayed outcomes, but most everyday decisions are more complicated. The present experiment focused on one such scenario, an iconic self-control situation in which immediate gains are followed by delayed losses. The same participants were studied in all conditions to permit examination of individual differences in choice behavior using intercorrelations and factor analysis.

Age-related differences in delay discounting: Income matters.

Although the authors of a recent meta-analysis concluded there were no age-related differences in the discounting of delayed rewards, they did not examine the effects of income (Seaman et al., 2022). Accordingly, the present study compared discounting by younger and older adults (Ages 35-50 and 65-80) differing in household income.

Discounting of delayed rewards: Missing data imputation for the 21- and 27-item monetary choice questionnaires.

The Monetary Choice Questionnaire (MCQ) is a widely used behavioral task that measures the rate of delay discounting (i.e., k), the degree to which a delayed reward loses its present value as a function of the time to its receipt.

Individual and Age Differences in Item and Context Memory.

We investigated whether individuals who are good at recognizing previously presented items are also good at recognizing the context in which items were presented. We focused specifically on whether the relation between item recognition and context recognition abilities differs in younger and older adults. It has been hypothesized that context memory declines more rapidly in older adults due to an age-related deficit in associative binding or recollection.

Individual differences in degree of discounting: Do different procedures and measures assess the same construct?

The present study compared the two most prominent procedures for measuring delay discounting, the Adjusting-Amount procedure and the Monetary Choice Questionnaire (MCQ). Of interest was whether the two procedures measure the same construct. Results obtained from two online samples recruited using the Prolific (N = 150) and MTurk (N = 243) platforms revealed generally similar results for both procedures.

Distress Signals: Age Differences in Psychological Distress before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Psychological distress reached historically high levels in 2020, but why, and why were there pronounced age differences? We address these questions using a relatively novel, multipronged approach, part narrative review and part new data analyses. We first updated previous analyses of national surveys that showed distress was increasing in the US and Australia through 2017 and then re-analyzed data from the UK, comparing periods with and without lockdowns. We also analyzed the effects of age and personality on distress in the US during the pandemic.

Discounting of outcomes in which immediate gains are followed by delayed losses.

Previous discounting research has focused on relatively simple situations (e.g., choosing between immediate and delayed gains, or between immediate and delayed losses) and the relations among amount, delay, and subjective value in such situations are now well established.

Differential effects of psychological distress on mitigation and vaccination: A public health conundrum.

CDC-recommended mitigation behaviors and vaccination status were assessed in an online sample ( = 810; ages 18-80). Results were consistent with a differential distress hypothesis positing that whereas psychological distress, which is induced in part by social deprivation, interferes with mitigation behaviors involving social distancing, it motivates vaccination, in part because it, in turn, can increase social interaction. Age modulated these effects.

Short-sighted decision-making by those not vaccinated against COVID-19.

Widespread vaccination is necessary to minimize or halt the effects of many infectious diseases, including COVID-19. Stagnating vaccine uptake can prolong pandemics, raising the question of how we might predict, prevent, and correct vaccine hesitancy and unwillingness. In a multinational sample (N = 4,452) recruited from 13 countries that varied in pandemic severity and vaccine uptake (July 2021), we examined whether short-sighted decision-making as exemplified by steep delay discounting-choosing smaller immediate rewards over larger delayed rewards-predicts COVID-19 vaccination status.

Increased Connectivity among Sensory and Motor Regions during Visual and Audiovisual Speech Perception.

In everyday conversation, we usually process the talker's face as well as the sound of the talker's voice. Access to visual speech information is particularly useful when the auditory signal is degraded. Here, we used fMRI to monitor brain activity while adult humans ( = 60) were presented with visual-only, auditory-only, and audiovisual words.

Individual differences in COVID-19 mitigation behaviors: The roles of age, gender, psychological state, and financial status.

The present study examined individual characteristics potentially associated with changes in mitigation behaviors (social distancing and hygiene) recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Analysis of online survey responses from 361 adults, ages 20-78, with US IP addresses, identified significant correlates of adaptive behavioral changes, with implications for preventive strategies and mental health needs. The extent to which individuals changed their mitigation behaviors was unrelated to self-rated health or concern regarding the personal effects of COVID-19 but was related to concern regarding the effects of the pandemic on others.

The role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex in reward valuation and future thinking during intertemporal choice.

Intertemporal choices require trade-offs between short-term and long-term outcomes. Ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) damage causes steep discounting of future rewards (delay discounting [DD]) and impoverished episodic future thinking (EFT). The role of vmPFC in reward valuation, EFT, and their interaction during intertemporal choice is still unclear.

Predicting Audiovisual Word Recognition in Noisy Situations: Toward Precision Audiology.

Objective: Spoken communication is better when one can see as well as hear the talker. Although age-related deficits in speech perception were observed, Tye-Murray and colleagues found that even when age-related deficits in audiovisual (AV) speech perception were observed, AV performance could be accurately predicted from auditory-only (A-only) and visual-only (V-only) performance, and that knowing individuals' ages did not increase the accuracy of prediction. This finding contradicts conventional wisdom, according to which age-related differences in AV speech perception are due to deficits in the integration of auditory and visual information, and our primary goal was to determine whether Tye-Murray et al.

Does Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Damage Really Increase Impulsiveness? Delay and Probability Discounting in Patients with Focal Lesions.

If the tendency to discount rewards reflects individuals' general level of impulsiveness, then the discounting of delayed and probabilistic rewards should be negatively correlated: The less a person is able to wait for delayed rewards, the more they should take chances on receiving probabilistic rewards. It has been suggested that damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vMPFC) increases individuals' impulsiveness, but both intertemporal choice and risky choice have only recently been assayed in the same patients with vMPFC damage. Here, we assess both delay and probability discounting in individuals with vMPFC damage (n = 8) or with medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage (n = 10), and in age- and education-matched controls (n = 30).

Guilty, Innocent, or Just Not Proven? Bayesian Verdicts in the Case of Inhibitory Deficits.

: This study addresses two issues: Whether age-related differences in working memory (WM) can be studied in online samples, and whether such differences reflect an inhibitory deficit. Currently, the evidence is mixed, but the playing field was not level because traditional statistics cannot provide evidence for the null hypothesis.: MTurk workers (ages 19-74) performed simple and complex visuospatial WM tasks to determine whether a secondary task affected the rate of age-related decline.

Delay discounting, cognitive ability, and personality: What matters?

Steep delay discounting is associated with problems such as addiction, obesity, and risky sexual behavior that are frequently described as reflecting impulsiveness and lack of self-control, but it may simply indicate poor cognitive functioning. The present investigation took advantage of the unique opportunity provided by the Human Connectome Project (N=1,206) to examine the relation between delay discounting and 11 cognitive tasks as well as the Big Five fundamental personality traits. With income level and education statistically controlled, discounting was correlated with only four of the 11 cognitive abilities evaluated, although the rs were all small (<.

Examining delay of gratification in healthy aging.

Delay of gratification (DofG) refers to the capacity to forego an immediate reward in order to receive a more desirable reward later. As a core executive function, it might be expected that DofG would follow the standard pattern of age-related decline observed in older adults for other executive tasks. However, there actually have been few studies of aging and DofG, and even these have shown mixed results, suggesting the need for further investigation and new approaches.

Choice patterns reveal qualitative individual differences among discounting of delayed gains, delayed losses, and probabilistic losses.

A new probabilistic losses questionnaire as well as Kirby's delayed gains questionnaire and a previously developed delayed losses questionnaire were administered to a large online sample. Almost all participants showed the positive discounting choice pattern expected on the Kirby questionnaire, decreasing their choice of a delayed gain as time to its receipt increased. In contrast, approximately 15% of the participants showed negative discounting on the delayed losses questionnaire and/or the probabilistic losses questionnaire, decreasing their choice of an immediate loss as time to a delayed loss decreased and/or decreasing their choice of a certain loss as likelihood of the probabilistic loss increased.

On Four Types of Devaluation of Outcomes Due to Their Costs: Delay, Probability, Effort, and Social Discounting.

Discounting refers to decreases in the subjective value of an outcome with increases in some attribute of that outcome. The attributes most commonly studied are delay and probability, with far less research on effort and social discounting. Although these attributes all represent costs that reduce subjective value, it is as yet unclear how the extent to which they do so is related at the individual level.

Is it time? Episodic imagining and the discounting of delayed and probabilistic rewards in young and older adults.

Remembering and imagining specific, personal experiences can help shape our decisions. For example, cues to imagine future events can reduce delay discounting (i.e.

On the Complexity of Discounting, Choice Situations, and People.

Although steep delay discounting is associated with various behavioral problems, perhaps most prominently substance abuse, we argue that it is best not conceived of as a character flaw such as impulsivity. Such a view, although part of a centuries-old tradition, does not distinguish between actions whose outcomes involve gains and losses, or between delayed outcomes and probabilistic outcomes, nor does it acknowledge that how steeply an individual discounts one of these kinds of outcome appears to be independent of how steeply they discount other kinds. Therefore, we advocate an approach that does not require making judgments about the character of the individuals involved.

Age Differences in the Effects of Speaking Rate on Auditory, Visual, and Auditory-Visual Speech Perception.

Objectives: This study was designed to examine how speaking rate affects auditory-only, visual-only, and auditory-visual speech perception across the adult lifespan. In addition, the study examined the extent to which unimodal (auditory-only and visual-only) performance predicts auditory-visual performance across a range of speaking rates. The authors hypothesized significant Age × Rate interactions in all three modalities and that unimodal performance would account for a majority of the variance in auditory-visual speech perception for speaking rates that are both slower and faster than normal.

When immediate losses are followed by delayed gains: Additive hyperboloid discounting models.

Discounting research has tended to focus on one simple situation, choice between an immediate, smaller gain and a larger, delayed gain, that is assumed by many to capture the essence of self-control. In everyday life, however, most choice situations are more complex, often involving combinations of gains and losses. We examined discounting in situations involving an immediate loss followed by a delayed gain that resulted in either a net gain (Experiment 1) or a net loss (Experiment 2) and compared it with discounting when there was only a delayed gain and no immediate loss.

Effects of environmental support on overt and covert visuospatial rehearsal.

People can rehearse to-be-remembered locations either overtly, using eye movements, or covertly, using only shifts of spatial attention. The present study examined whether the effectiveness of these two strategies depends on environmental support for rehearsal. In Experiment 1, when environmental support (i.