Abstract
Behavioral studies demonstrate that the timing of receiving gains or losses affects decision-making, a phenomenon known as temporal discounting, as participants are inclined to prefer immediate rewards over delayed ones and vice versa for losses. The present study used the event-related potential technique with a simple gambling task to investigate how delayed rewards and losses affected the brain activity in outcome evaluations made by 20 young adults. Statistical analysis revealed a larger feedback-related negativity (FRN) effect between loss and gain following immediate outcomes than following future outcomes. In addition, delay impacted FRN only in gain conditions, with delayed winning eliciting a more negative FRN than immediate winning. These results suggest that temporal discounting and sign effect could be encoded in the FRN in the early stage of outcome evaluation.
Highlights
Time is an important dimension when assessing the value of a reward in a decision-making situation because when delivery of a reward is delayed, an individual’s valuation of a future reward declines (Mazur, 1987)
The present study comprehensively investigated the neural basis of temporal discounting to verify whether temporal information and valence could be integrated and encoded in the feedback-related negativity (FRN) and P300
FEEDBACK-RELATED NEGATIVITY Figures 2 and 3 indicate that, in accordance with previous studies reporting FRN, negative feedback elicited a negative-going waveform that reached its maximum over frontocentral scalp Positions
Summary
Time is an important dimension when assessing the value of a reward in a decision-making situation because when delivery of a reward is delayed, an individual’s valuation of a future reward declines (Mazur, 1987). This phenomenon is generally referred to as temporal discounting (Samuelson, 1937; Ainslie, 1975). Single valuation account holds that the values of both immediate and delayed rewards are represented in a unitary system encompassing the ventral striatum, medial prefrontal cortex, and posterior cingulate cortex (Kable and Glimcher, 2007, 2010). In the self-control account, values are assumed to be represented in structures such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) but are subject to top-down modulation by prefrontal control regions such as the lateral PFC (Hare et al, 2009; Figner et al, 2010)
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