Abstract
Delay discounting (DD) research has become ubiquitous due to its robust associations with clinical outcomes. Typical DD tasks involve multiple trials in which participants indicate preference between smaller, sooner and larger, later rewards. Scoring of these binary choice tasks has not considered trial-level ambivalence as a possible decision-making construct. The present study explored the extent to which trial-level ambivalence varied within-individual using an established assessment of DD (the Monetary Choice Questionnaire). Results indicate that degree of ambivalence peaks around the trials associated with the DD rate. Moreover, ambivalence is associated with a diminished impact of reward delay differences on choice, where greater delay differences decrease the odds of choosing the larger, later rewards. Taken together, we believe ambivalence to be a relevant construct for research on intertemporal decision making, and it may be particularly useful in the study of manipulations on individual rates of DD.
Highlights
Delay discounting (DD) refers to the reduction in the subjective value of an outcome when its delivery is delayed (Odum, 2011), and a substantial body of literature has linked rates of DD to behaviors where immediate rewards have delayed consequences
Only Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers that had completed at least 100 Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs) with at least a 95% HIT approval were eligible for this study, which has been shown to provide higher quality data (Peer et al, 2014) and has been recommended as an alternative to using attention checks (Chandler and Shapiro, 2016)
Some researchers have suggested consistency scores serve as a proxy for attentiveness (Gray et al, 2016), so we believe the majority of our participants paid attention to and understood the task
Summary
Delay discounting (DD) refers to the reduction in the subjective value of an outcome when its delivery is delayed (Odum, 2011), and a substantial body of literature has linked rates of DD to behaviors where immediate rewards have delayed consequences. Previous efforts have sought to examine this possibility using behavioral proxies for the ambivalence construct As it is intuitive for a greater degree of deliberation to occur as the subjective values of two options approach equivalence, one might expect that the deliberation period increases as the outcomes become subjectively equivalent at the individual level. A study examining mouse cursor trajectories in similar tasks discovered that trials around the point of subjective equivalence (termed indifference point in other DD assessments; Mazur, 1987) were associated with significantly greater mouse curvatures and, by implication, deliberation (Dshemuchadse et al, 2013) As these studies examined behavioral proxies for ambivalence, the current study sought to explore decision making as it relates to choice difficulty via degree of participant-reported ambivalence on each trial of a binary choice DD task. As ambivalence increases, it was hypothesized (H2) that the relative impact of the reward magnitude and delay sensitivities on triallevel choices would diminish (i.e., trend toward 0)
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