Abstract
When making choices between smaller, sooner rewards and larger, later ones, people tend to discount future outcomes. Individual differences in temporal discounting in older adults have been associated with episodic memory abilities and entorhinal cortical thickness. The cause of this association between better memory and more future-oriented choice remains unclear, however. One possibility is that people with perceptually richer recollections are more patient because they also imagine the future more vividly. Alternatively, perhaps people whose memories focus more on the meaning of events (i.e., are more “gist-based”) show reduced temporal discounting, since imagining the future depends on interactions between semantic and episodic memory. We examined which categories of episodic details – perception-based or gist-based – are associated with temporal discounting in older adults. Older adults whose autobiographical memories were richer in perception-based details showed reduced temporal discounting. Furthermore, in an exploratory neuroanatomical analysis, both discount rates and perception-based details correlated with entorhinal cortical thickness. Retrieving autobiographical memories before choice did not affect temporal discounting, however, suggesting that activating episodic memory circuitry at the time of choice is insufficient to alter discounting in older adults. These findings elucidate the role of episodic memory in decision making, which will inform interventions to nudge intertemporal choices.
Highlights
When making choices between smaller, sooner rewards and larger, later ones, people tend to discount future outcomes
Individual differences in perception-based autobiographical memory details are associated with temporal discounting
To ensure that the relationship between perception-based autobiographical memory details and temporal discounting was not driven by differences in narrative style, we examined the association between subcategories of www.nature.com/scientificreports external details and temporal discounting
Summary
When making choices between smaller, sooner rewards and larger, later ones, people tend to discount future outcomes. Temporal discounting was associated with the structural integrity of a key neural region in the episodic www.nature.com/scientificreports memory system, the medial temporal lobe (in the entorhinal cortex)[31] One limitation of this previous study, is that it examined only standard neuropsychological measures of memory (word list recall, logical memory, and visuospatial memory recall), which may not fully capture age-related decline in episodic memory in cognitively normal older adults. Consistent with this notion, studies show that imagining the future more concretely at the time of intertemporal choice increases the likelihood of choosing larger, later rewards[16,17,41,42] Another possibility is that more future-oriented choice will be associated with the extent to which memories are more gist-based. As in previous research from Sheldon and colleagues[35], we classified time, place, and perceptual details as “perception-based,” and event and emotion/thought details as “gist-based.” We examined the relationship between temporal discounting and the extent to which autobiographical memories were richer in perception-based or gist-based details, as well as the number of internal details in memory descriptions overall
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