The discounting-by-interruptions hypothesis: model and experiment

Henly, Samuel E.; Ostdiek, Allison; Blackwell, Erika; Knutie, Sarah A.; Dunlap, Aimee S.; Stephens, David W.

doi:10.1093/beheco/arm110

Cited by 23 publications

(20 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…One common explanation for steep discounting rates in the intertemporal choice task is that the animals are sensitive to collection risk or interruption risk (Green & Myerson, 1996;Henly et al, 2007;Kagel, Green, & Caraco, 1986;McNamara & Houston, 1987). The gist of this argument is that animals who wait for some food risk losing it all to a rival or to a prey escaping.…”

Section: Evolutionary Theory Predicts Neutral Time Preferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Despite the pedigree of this idea, it seems unlikely that interruption risk plays a major role in laboratory intertemporal choice tasks. First, it is implausible to imagine much interruption risk in the very small number of seconds associated with discounting in most laboratory experiments (Henly et al, 2007;Stephens & Anderson, 2001;Stephens et al, 2004). Second, empirical testing of this idea has marshaled evidence opposing it (Henly et al, 2007).…”

Section: Evolutionary Theory Predicts Neutral Time Preferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…First, it is implausible to imagine much interruption risk in the very small number of seconds associated with discounting in most laboratory experiments (Henly et al, 2007;Stephens & Anderson, 2001;Stephens et al, 2004). Second, empirical testing of this idea has marshaled evidence opposing it (Henly et al, 2007). Third, collection risk cannot explain the hyperbolic shape of the discount curve; it predicts an exponential shape.…”

Section: Evolutionary Theory Predicts Neutral Time Preferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Time discounting and time preference in animals: A critical review

2015

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Animals are an important model for studies of impulsivity and self-control. Many studies have made use of the intertemporal choice task, which pits small rewards available sooner against larger rewards available later (typically several seconds), repeated over many trials. Preference for the sooner reward is often taken to indicate impulsivity and/or a failure of self-control. This review shows that very little evidence supports this assumption; on the contrary, ostensible discounting behavior may reflect a boundedly rational but not necessarily impulsive reward-maximizing strategy. Specifically, animals may discount weakly, or even adopt a long-term rate-maximizing strategy, but fail to fully incorporate postreward delays into their choices. This failure may reflect learning biases. Consequently, tasks that measure animal discounting may greatly overestimate the true discounting and may be confounded by processes unrelated to time preferences. If so, animals may be much more patient than is widely believed; human and animal intertemporal choices may reflect unrelated mental operations; and the shared hyperbolic shape of the human and animal discount curves, which is used to justify cross-species comparisons, may be coincidental. The discussion concludes with a consideration of alternative ways to measure self-control in animals.

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Section: Evolutionary Theory Predicts Neutral Time Preferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Evolutionary Theory Predicts Neutral Time Preferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Evolutionary Theory Predicts Neutral Time Preferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Time discounting and time preference in animals: A critical review

2015

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“…In particular, animals with relatively long lifetimes may value rewards today more than rewards tomorrow, but a difference in delay of less than a minute should not be enough to cause a preference reversal. Additionally, Henly et al (2008) show that likelihood of interruptions, which is often used to justify the discounting hypothesis, has negligible impact on impulsiveness observed in the laboratory.…”

Section: Impulsiveness Without Discountingmentioning

confidence: 95%

When rate maximization is impulsive

Pavlic

Passino

2010

Behav Ecol Sociobiol

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Although optimal foraging theory predicts that natural selection should favor animal behaviors that maximize long-term rate of gain, behaviors observed in the laboratory tend to be impulsive. In binary-choice experiments, despite the long-term gain of each alternative, animals favor short handling times. Most explanations of this behavior suggest that there is hidden rationality in impulsiveness. Instead, we suggest that simultaneous and mutually exclusive binary-choice encounters are often unnatural and thus immune to the effects of natural selection. Using a simulation of an imperfect forager, we show how a simple strategy (i.e., an intuitive model of animal behavior) that maximizes long-term rate of gain under natural conditions appears to be impulsive under operant laboratory conditions. We then show how the accuracy of this model can be verified in the laboratory by biasing subjects with a short pre-experiment ad libitum high-quality feeding period. We also show a similar behavioral mechanism results in diet preferences that are qualitatively consistent with the digestive rate model of foraging (i.e., foraging under digestive rate constraints).

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“…Kagel et al. 1986; Sozou 1998; Stephens 2002; Dasgupta & Maskin 2005, see Henly et al. 2007 for an experimental account).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The evolution of social discounting in hierarchically clustered populations

Lehmann

Rousset

2011

Molecular Ecology

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The expression of a social behaviour may affect the fitness of actors and recipients living in the present and in the future of the population. When there is a risk that a future reward will not be experienced in such a context, the value of that reward should be discounted; but by how much? Here, we evaluate social discount rates for delayed fitness rewards to group of recipients living at different positions in both space and time than the actor in a hierarchically clustered population. This is a population where individuals are grouped into families, families into villages, villages into clans, and so on, possibly ad infinitum. The group-wide fitness effects are assumed to either increase or decrease the fecundity or the survival of recipients and can be arbitrarily extended in space and time. We find that actions changing the survival of individuals living in the future are generally more strongly discounted than fecundity-changing actions for all future times and that the value of future rewards increases as individuals live longer. We also find that delayed fitness effects may not only be discounted by a constant factor per unit delay (exponential discounting), but that, as soon as there is localized dispersal in a population, discounting per unit delay is likely to fall rapidly for small delays and then slowly for longer delays (hyperbolic discounting). As dispersal tends to be localized in natural populations, our results suggest that evolution is likely to favour individuals that express present-biased behaviours and that may be time-inconsistent with respect to their groupwide effects.

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The discounting-by-interruptions hypothesis: model and experiment

Cited by 23 publications

References 21 publications

Time discounting and time preference in animals: A critical review

Time discounting and time preference in animals: A critical review

When rate maximization is impulsive

The evolution of social discounting in hierarchically clustered populations

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