Delay of gratification dissociates cognitive control and valuation brain regions in healthy young adults

Delay of gratification (DofG) refers to an inter-temporal choice phenomenon that is of great interest in many domains, including animal learning, cognitive development, economic decision-making, and executive control. Yet experimental tools for investigating DofG in human adults are almost non-existent, and as a consequence, very little is known regarding the brain basis of core DofG behaviors. Here, we utilize a novel DofG paradigm, adapted for use in neuroimaging contexts, to examine event-related changes in neural activity as healthy young adult participants made repeated choices to continue waiting for a delayed reward, rather than take an immediately available one of lesser value. On DofG trials, choose-to-wait events were associated with increased activation in fronto-parietal and cingulo-opercular regions associated with cognitive control. Activity in the right lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) was also associated with individual variability in task performance and strategy. Fronto-parietal activity was clearly dissociable from that observed in ventromedial PFC, as this latter region exhibited a ramping-up pattern of activity during the waiting period prior to reward delivery. Ventromedial PFC ramping activity dynamics were further selective to DofG trials associated with increased future reward rate, consistent with the involvement of this region in subjective reward valuation that incorporates higher-order task structure. These results provide important initial validation of this experimental paradigm as a useful tool for investigating and isolating unique DofG neural mechanisms, which can now be utilized to study a wide-variety of populations and task factors.