Links between autobiographical memory richness and temporal discounting in older adults

Abstract

When making choices between smaller, sooner rewards and larger, later ones, people tend to discount future outcomes. Individual differences in temporal discounting in older adults have been associated with episodic memory abilities and entorhinal cortical thickness. the cause of this association between better memory and more future-oriented choice remains unclear, however. one possibility is that people with perceptually richer recollections are more patient because they also imagine the future more vividly. Alternatively, perhaps people whose memories focus more on the meaning of events (i.e., are more "gist-based") show reduced temporal discounting, since imagining the future depends on interactions between semantic and episodic memory. We examined which categories of episodic details-perception-based or gist-based-are associated with temporal discounting in older adults. older adults whose autobiographical memories were richer in perception-based details showed reduced temporal discounting. furthermore, in an exploratory neuroanatomical analysis, both discount rates and perception-based details correlated with entorhinal cortical thickness. Retrieving autobiographical memories before choice did not affect temporal discounting, however, suggesting that activating episodic memory circuitry at the time of choice is insufficient to alter discounting in older adults. These findings elucidate the role of episodic memory in decision making, which will inform interventions to nudge intertemporal choices. Throughout our lives, we face many intertemporal choices that involve trade-offs between smaller, immediate gains and larger, long-term benefits 1. For example, an individual may have to decide whether or not it is worth paying a fee to withdraw retirement funds early. People generally tend to prefer immediate rewards to delayed ones, and they discount the value of delayed rewards to a greater extent as the delay to receiving them increases. This tendency towards temporal discounting is nearly universal, but the rate at which people discount future rewards varies widely 2,3. Steep temporal discounting, or overvaluing the present at one's long-term expense, is associated with risky behaviors such as alcohol use 4 , gambling 5 , smoking 6,7 , and excessive credit card borrowing 8. Given the substantial negative impact of steep temporal discounting, it is important to understand the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie intertemporal choices, and to use this knowledge to develop interventions that could reduce impatience. The literature on the neural correlates of temporal discounting points to the involvement of valuation regions 9-11 , executive control regions 12-15 and episodic memory regions 16,17 in this choice process. It remains unclear, however, which of these neurocognitive systems underlies individual differences in the tendency to discount future rewards. One neurocognitive system that may support future-oriented intertemporal choices is episodic memory, or context-rich memory for autobiographical events 1...

Temporal discounting across adulthood: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

“…Many interventions have focused on reducing time discounting in young adulthood (Rung & Madden, 2018) but fewer have focused on the flexibility of discounting in older age (Sasse et al, 2017). Identifying individual factors that account for discounting in older age specifically (e.g., Lempert et al, 2020) may provide insight into the development of interventions for optimizing future-oriented choice later in life.…”

Functional Connectivity Correlates of Perceived Financial Exploitation in Older Adults

“…The hippocampus is also thought to play a role in prospection, or mental time travel (Buckner, 2010 ). Prospection is an important function for decision-making in that it allows an individual to envision the needs of the future with sufficient detail and predict possible outcomes of decisions to make an informed choice (Weierich et al, 2011 ; Lempert et al, 2020 ). Due to age-related changes to brain regions such as the medial temporal lobes important for prospection, Weierich et al ( 2011 ) suggest that older adults have difficulty imagining the future in detail and are more likely to rely on affective states when making decisions.…”

Individual Differences in Intertemporal Choice

“…Evidence from structural imaging studies suggests that regional gray (gMV) and white matter volumes can to some extent predict individual differences in discount rates. In general, temporal discounting correlates with (i) gMV of regions associated with valuation such as striatum, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) (Cho et al, 2013;Tschernegg et al, 2015;Guo et al, 2017), (ii) gMV of regions associated with cognitive control and other more deliberate processes such as dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and frontal pole (FP) (Bjork et al, 2009;Mohammadi et al, 2016;Wang et al, 2016), as well as (iii) gMV and white matter volume of regions associated with memory and future-oriented thinking (hippocampus/parahippocampus, entorhinal cortex; Yu, 2012;Wang et al, 2016;Lempert et al, 2020).…”