A delay-specific neural indicator corresponds to delay-discounting behavior for both gain and loss

Delay-discounting, wherein the subjective value for delayed gain or loss decreases, has been attracting much attention from the social sciences as well as neuroscience and has been suggested asbeing related to reward processing in the brain. As reported, the feedback-related negativity (FRN), an electrophysiological measure of reward processing, increased by delayed-monetary gain and ΔFRN, which is the difference in FRNs for loss and gain at a certain time point, had no significant correlation with delay-discounting for gain. Thus, although a delay for gain could affect FRN, it is unclear whether FRN capturing such a delay effect has a direct relationship with delay-discounting in both gain and loss domains.

In this study, we introduced a delay-specific indicator, ΔFRNdelay, that is, the difference between FRN with and without delays, and investigated its direct relationship during the doors task with the discounting rate measured by the delay-discounting task in both the gain and loss domains.

We found that, for loss, the delay enhanced FRN, whereas no such effect was observed for gains, and that this indicator was significantly correlated with delay-discounting in both domains.

To our knowledge, this study is the first to suggest that FRN is sensitive to the effects of delay in losses on reward processing and that the new indicator directly corresponds to changes in subjective value as measured by delay-discounting.