Cognitive Control Modulates Effects of Episodic Simulation on Delay Discounting in Aging

Enhancing prospective thinking by tagging the future with specific episodic events has been shown to reduce delay discounting in young age ("tag-effect"). So far, it is unclear whether such beneficial effect extends to old adulthood. Since the general ability of future thinking and cognitive control are crucial modulators of temporal discounting in young age, potential age-related decline in these functions might impact on the effect. We focused on this issue by combining functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with an established intertemporal choice task including episodic "tags" in healthy older participants. Future thinking ability was assessed using autobiographical interviews for future event simulations and a visual search task was applied to assess participants' cognitive control ability. In contrast to previous data in young adults, the group of older participants did not benefit from tagging the future with episodic events. Older participants' cognitive control function was directly associated with discounting rates in the episodic conditions: the less the older adults were able to focus their attention the less they benefited from the inclusion of episodic events. Consistent with this, imaging results revealed that: (a) subjective value (SV) signals in the hippocampus and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) as well as; (b) hippocampal-striatal coupling during the episodic condition were positively related to participants' control capacity. Our findings highlight the critical role of executive functioning for the simultaneous integration of episodic information with future value computation in aging. Boosting delay gratification by including episodic tags might hence be limited in older individuals with pronounced decline in distraction control.