The aim of this study was to examine delay discounting in girls and boys with ADHD-Combined type (ADHD-C) relative to typically developing (TD) children on two tasks that differ in the extent to which the rewards and delays were experienced by participants. Children ages 8-12 years with ADHD-C (n=65; 19 girls) and TD controls (n=55; 15 girls) completed two delay discounting tasks involving a se...

Heuristic models have been proposed for many domains of choice. We compare heuristic models of intertemporal choice, which can account for many of the known intertemporal choice anomalies, to discounting models. We conduct an out-of-sample, cross-validated comparison of intertemporal choice models. Heuristic models outperform traditional utility discounting models, including models of exponenti...

Discounted Cost Register Automata (DCRA) associate costs with strings in a regular manner using the operation of discounted sum. The min-cost optimization problem for DCRAs corresponds to computing shortest paths in graphs with more general forms of discounting than the well-studied notion of future discounting. We present solutions to two classes of such shortest path problems: in presence of ...

When asked to choose between immediate and delayed rewards or costs, both human and (other) animal respondents will equate a small reward sooner with a larger one later. This is the well-known phenomenon of individual “discounting.” The capital interest rates that prevail in market economies are a related phenomenon. Most economists agree that “social” discounting should be applied to compare c...

BACKGROUND The objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that cognitive function is negatively associated with temporal discounting in old age. METHODS Participants were 388 community-dwelling older persons without dementia from the Rush Memory and Aging Project, an ongoing longitudinal epidemiologic study of aging in the Chicago metropolitan area. Temporal discounting was measured u...

BACKGROUND Excessive discounting of future rewards has been observed in a variety of disorders and has been linked both to valuation of the past and to memory of past events. METHODS To explore the functionality of discounting and memory, we examined whether training of working memory would result in less discounting of future rewards. In this study, 27 adults in treatment for stimulant use w...

Controversies about time discounting loom large in decisions about climate change. Prominently, a particularly controversial debate about time discounting in climate change decision-making has been conducted within climate economics, between the authors of Stern et al. (Stern review on the economics of climate change, 2006) and their critics (most prominently Dasgupta in Comments on the Stern r...

Studies of delay discounting typically have involved choices between smaller, immediate outcomes and larger, delayed outcomes. In a study of delay discounting in humans, Green et al. (2005) added a period of time prior to both outcomes, creating a delay common to both. They found that the subjective value of the more delayed reward was well described by a hyperboloid discounting function and th...

Delay discounting-often referred to as hyperbolic discounting in the financial literature-is defined by a consistent preference for smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards, and by failure of future consequences to curtail current consummatory behaviors. Previous research demonstrates (1) excessive delay discounting among individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder ...

The value of a reinforcer decreases as the time until its receipt increases, a phenomenon referred to as delay discounting. Although delay discounting of non-drug reinforcers has been studied extensively in a number of species, our knowledge of discounting in non-human primates is limited. In the present study, rhesus monkeys were allowed to choose in discrete trials between 0.05% saccharin del...