NYU-ECNU Institute of Brain and Cognitive Science at NYU Shanghai, Shanghai, China.
NYU Shanghai, Shanghai, China.
Elife. 2019 Feb 5;8:e39656. doi: 10.7554/eLife.39656.
Individual differences in delay-discounting correlate with important real world outcomes, for example education, income, drug use, and criminality. As such, delay-discounting has been extensively studied by economists, psychologists and neuroscientists to reveal its behavioral and biological mechanisms in both human and non-human animal models. However, two major methodological differences hinder comparing results across species. Human studies present long time-horizon options verbally, whereas animal studies employ experiential cues and short delays. To bridge these divides, we developed a novel language-free experiential task inspired by animal decision-making studies. We found that the ranks of subjects' time-preferences were reliable across both verbal/experiential and second/day differences. Yet, discount factors scaled dramatically across the tasks, indicating a strong effect of temporal context. Taken together, this indicates that individuals have a stable, but context-dependent, time-preference that can be reliably assessed using different methods, providing a foundation to bridge studies of time-preferences across species.
This article has been through an editorial process in which the authors decide how to respond to the issues raised during peer review. The Reviewing Editor's assessment is that all the issues have been addressed (see decision letter).
个体在延迟折扣方面的差异与重要的现实世界结果相关，例如教育、收入、药物使用和犯罪。因此，经济学家、心理学家和神经科学家广泛研究了延迟折扣，以揭示其在人类和非人类动物模型中的行为和生物学机制。然而，两个主要的方法学差异阻碍了跨物种比较结果。人类研究通过口头呈现长时间范围的选项，而动物研究则使用经验线索和短延迟。为了弥合这些差距，我们开发了一种新的无语言经验任务，灵感来自动物决策研究。我们发现，受试者时间偏好的等级在口头/经验和第二天差异上都是可靠的。然而，折扣因素在任务中急剧变化，表明时间背景的强烈影响。总的来说，这表明个体有一个稳定但依赖于上下文的时间偏好，可以使用不同的方法可靠地评估，为跨越物种的时间偏好研究提供了基础。
本文经过了编辑过程，作者在其中决定如何处理同行评审期间提出的问题。审稿编辑的评估是所有问题都已得到解决（见评审信）。
