Time preferences are reliable across time-horizons and verbal versus experiential tasks

Area of Science:

• Decision-making science
• Comparative psychology
• Neuroeconomics

Background:

• Individual differences in delay-discounting, a measure of time preference, predict real-world outcomes like education, income, drug use, and criminality.
• Delay-discounting is studied across species, but methodological differences (verbal vs. experiential, long vs. short delays) hinder cross-species comparisons.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel, language-free experiential task to bridge methodological divides in delay-discounting research between human and animal studies.
• To assess the reliability and context-dependency of time preferences using a unified approach.

Main Methods:

• Developed a novel language-free experiential task for assessing delay-discounting, inspired by animal decision-making paradigms.
• Compared time preferences assessed via verbal and experiential methods across different temporal scales (seconds vs. days).

Main Results:

• Subject rankings of time preferences were reliable across both verbal/experiential tasks and short/long delay differences.
• Discount factors, however, showed significant scaling across tasks, indicating a strong influence of temporal context.

Conclusions:

• Individuals possess stable, yet context-dependent, time preferences.
• The developed experiential task reliably assesses time preferences, providing a foundation for cross-species comparisons in decision-making research.