Brief report on the relationship between temporal discount rate and error related negativity for immediate versus...

It is well documented that individuals vary in their economic patience - their willingness to choose delayed larger rewards (e.g., $100 in a month) over immediate smaller rewards (e.g., $25 now) - and that high levels of impatience, or temporal discounting, can be behaviorally problematic. Using event-related potential (ERP) method, we investigated error monitoring, as indexed by the error related negativity (ERN) component, as a function of discounting behavior. This work builds on prior work on risky decision making that revealed that individuals have greater ERNs for trials in which they select a risky option over a certain one (Yu and Zhou 2009), especially individuals not inclined towards risk taking (Martin and Potts 2009). In the present study, participants completed a temporal discounting task (choosing between a fixed immediate reward versus a future reward that varied across trials) while electroencephalogram (EEG) activity was recorded. We found an asymmetric relationship between discounting and the ERN: the greater an individual's overall rate of discounting, the greater the ERN component of the ERP waveform on trials where the future reward was selected, but not on trials in which the immediate reward was selected. The ERN may reflect an early warning signal alerting high discounters to potential negative consequences of future-oriented choices.