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

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.