The relationship between intertemporal and attentional discounting

When making decisions, individuals tend to favor the currently attended alternative. However, there is heterogeneity in the relationship between attention and choice, and it is unclear what factors explain this variance across people. This article proposes and finds that the extent to which individuals intertemporally discount future rewards is one behavioral factor that is associated with differences in attentional biases across people. Across four laboratory studies that tracked attentional deployment and asked participants to make trade-offs between smaller-sooner and larger-later rewards, we found that individuals who were more likely to choose the smaller-sooner reward also were more likely to attentionally discount an unattended alternative. Furthermore, in three additional studies, we find that two common framing manipulations that alter intertemporal decision making also shift the degree to which unattended alternatives are attentionally discounted when making decisions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).