Cuing both positive and negative episodic foresight reduces delay discounting but does not affect risk-taking

Abstract

Humans frequently create mental models of the future, allowing outcomes to be inferred in advance of their occurrence. Recent evidence suggests that imagining positive future events reduces delay discounting (the devaluation of reward with time until its receipt), while imagining negative future events may increase it. Here, using a sample of 297 participants, we experimentally assess the effects of cued episodic simulation of positive and negative future scenarios on decision-making in the context of both delay discounting (monetary choice questionnaire) and risk-taking (balloon-analogue risk task). Participants discounted the future less when cued to imagine positive and negative future scenarios than they did when cued to engage in control neutral imagery. There were no effects of experimental condition on risk-taking. Thus, although these results replicate previous findings suggesting episodic future simulation can reduce delay discounting, they indicate that this effect is not dependent on the valence of the thoughts, and does not generalise to all other forms of “impulsive” decision-making. We discuss various interpretations of these results, and suggest avenues for further research on the role of prospection in decision-making.

Imagining Events Alternative to the Present Can Attenuate Delay Discounting

“…Previous research has shown that engaging in episodic future thinking during intertemporal choice reduces individuals' natural disposition towards immediate gratification in favor of choices with long-term benefits, attenuating DD (e.g., Peters and Büchel, 2010;Benoit et al, 2011;Daniel et al, 2013;Lin and Epstein, 2014;Dassen et al, 2016;Bromberg et al, 2017;Bulley and Gullo, 2017;Bulley et al, 2019). In most DD tasks, episodic future thoughts are instilled in intertemporal choice using online cues that point to (previously imagined) experiences to occur at the relevant task delays.…”

“…In the episodic cue (compared to the standard) task, individuals' preferences shifted towards future rewards, and the reduction of DD rates was associated with the vividness of the imagined future event and with increased functional coupling between the hippocampus and vmPFC and ACC regions associated with reward processing and valuation (Kable and Glimcher, 2007;Peters and Büchel, 2010;Benoit et al, 2011). The effect of episodic cueing on DD is consistently found in healthy individuals (Benoit et al, 2011;Liu et al, 2013;Lin and Epstein, 2014;Bromberg et al, 2017;O'Donnell et al, 2017O'Donnell et al, , 2018Zhang et al, 2018;Bulley et al, 2019), as well as patients with substance abuse disorders (Daniel et al, 2013;Snider et al, 2016), in whom it extends to real-world indices of impulsive choice, such as impulsive drinking or eating (Daniel et al, 2013;Dassen et al, 2016; see also Wu et al, 2017). In contrast, consistent with Peters and Büchel's (2010) finding that episodic cueing effects on DD are conditional upon the imagination of vivid future events, no episodic cueing effect has been observed in amnesic patients with hippocampal damage (Palombo et al, 2014; but see Kwan et al, 2015), who cannot construct detail-rich future events (Race et al, 2011;see also De Luca et al, 2018) to use for decisions.…”

“…One view is that the vivid imagination of future events triggers emotions in the here-and-now (Gilbert and Wilson, 2007;Damasio, 2009), rendering future rewards more emotionally engaging and desirable, and therefore capable to compete for salience with rewards that are available immediately (Boyer, 2008;Ciaramelli and di Pellegrino, 2011;. There is some evidence, indeed, that positive but not negative episodic future thinking reduces DD (Liu et al, 2013;Zhang et al, 2018), although other research using large samples has detected episodic cueing effects even following neutral (Lin and Epstein, 2014) and even negative future thinking (Bulley et al, 2019). Episodic future thinking may also alter participants' time perspective (Lin and Epstein, 2014), increase personal connectedness to the future (O'Donnell et al, 2017), and promote a more concrete and detailed construal of future events (Cheng et al, 2012;Lebreton et al, 2013), biasing choice accordingly.…”

Future thinking is related to lower delay discounting than recent thinking, regardless of the magnitude of the reward, in individuals with schizotypy

“…Therefore, the primary goals of this study were to examine whether EFT induced lower discounting rate compared to episodic recent thinking (ERT) in schizotypy and whether it was related to the magnitude of reward. Given previous studies have consistently shown that positive EFT significantly reduced discounting rate, while the effect of negative EFT was inconsistent (Bulley et al, 2019;Calluso, Tosoni, Cannito, & Committeri, 2019;Liu, Feng, Chen, & Li, 2013;S. Zhang et al, 2018).…”

“…As to the emotional valence of the imagined events, studies consistently revealed that positive EFT significantly reduced delay discounting, while the effect of negative EFT was inconsistent (Bulley et al, 2019;Calluso et al, 2019;Liu et al, 2013;S. Zhang et al, 2018).…”