Comparing rapid assessments of delay discounting with real and hypothetical rewards in children

Abstract

Recent advances in assessment methodology have resulted in a highly efficient procedure for obtaining delay discounting rates for adults: a 5‐trial adjusting delay task (ADT‐5) examining intertemporal choice for hypothetical rewards. The low participant burden of this task makes it potentially useful for children, with whom delay discounting research is relatively limited. However, it is unknown whether results from this task match choice for real rewards. The present study assessed delay discounting for real and hypothetical monetary rewards using a modified ADT‐5 with 9 children admitted to a psychiatric day treatment program. Participants completed up to 3 tasks with each reward type in alternating order. No difference in discounting rate, via log(k), was observed between the first task of each reward type. This finding was replicated across subsequent tasks for the subset of participants (n = 6) who completed all 6 tasks. However, delay discounting of real and hypothetical rewards was not found to be statistically equivalent. These results suggest that a modified ADT‐5 using hypothetical rewards may be a viable option for assessing delay discounting in children with psychiatric diagnoses, but additional research is needed to explicitly examine whether hypothetical and real rewards are discounted equivalently in this population.

Real, potentially real, and hypothetical monetary rewards in probability discounting

“…The present results are inconsistent with several delay‐discounting experiments (Hinvest & Anderson, 2010; Lagorio & Madden, 2005; Miller, 2019), which reported no differential effects when discounting of real and hypothetical. As shown by the finding that amount of reward had opposite effects on the discounting of delayed and probabilistic outcomes (Green et al, 1999), probabilistic discounting does not seem to be equivalent to delayed discounting.…”

“…To date, several studies directly have compared the discounting of hypothetical rewards with real ones. When money was used as rewards, with one exception (Jikko & Okouchi, 2007), no significant differences have been found between discounting of hypothetical and real rewards (Baker et al, 2003; Green & Lawyer, 2014; Hinvest & Anderson, 2010; Johnson & Bickel, 2002; Lagorio & Madden, 2005; Lawyer et al, 2011, 2022; Locey et al, 2011; Madden et al, 2003, 2004; Matusiewicz et al, 2013; Miller, 2019; Rasmussen et al, 2022; Robertson & Rasmussen, 2018).…”

“…However, two limitations require further comparisons. First, with a few exceptions (Hinvest & Anderson, 2010;Jikko & Okouchi, 2007;Lagorio & Madden, 2005;Miller, 2019), all of the studies in fact compared the discounting of hypothetical rewards with potentially real rewards (Baker et al, 2003;Green & Lawyer, 2014;Johnson & Bickel, 2002;Lawyer et al, 2011Lawyer et al, , 2022Locey et al, 2011;Madden et al, 2003Madden et al, , 2004Matusiewicz et al, 2013;Rasmussen et al, 2022;Robertson & Rasmussen, 2018). In these studies, the participants made a large number of choices.…”

“…The second limitation is that only four studies have compared the discounting of hypothetical monetary rewards to that of real ones (hereafter, the term real rewards will be only used if the consequences of all choices are delivered) with delay (Hinvest & Anderson, 2010;Lagorio & Madden, 2005;Miller, 2019) or probability (Hinvest & Anderson, 2010;Jikko & Okouchi, 2007). When larger rewards were delayed, no significant differences were found between discounting rates of hypothetical and real rewards (Hinvest & Anderson, 2010;Lagorio & Madden, 2005;Miller, 2019). In contrast, when larger rewards were delivered probabilistically, the results are mixed (Green, Myerson, & Vanderveldt, 2014).…”

A Rapid Assessment of Sensitivity to Reward Delays and Classwide Token Economy Savings for School-Aged Children

“…The present study attempted to fill the gap in the literature pointed by Staubitz et al ( 2018 ) and introduce a brief assessment of sensitivity to reward delays for children. While other discounting procedures for children show promise in research settings (e.g., Miller, 2019 ), the current approach leverages a larger body of existing research on the protocol and does not require specific technologies typically afforded to scientists (e.g., survey software).…”