Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US.
Department of Neurology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US.
Sci Rep. 2020 Apr 14;10(1):6431. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-63373-1.
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.
当在较小、较早的奖励和较大、较晚的奖励之间做出选择时，人们往往会低估未来的结果。老年人中时间折扣的个体差异与情景记忆能力和内嗅皮质厚度有关。然而，这种更好的记忆和更面向未来的选择之间的关联的原因尚不清楚。一种可能性是，具有更丰富感知回忆的人更有耐心，因为他们也更生动地想象未来。或者，那些记忆更关注事件意义的人（即基于“概要”）表现出时间折扣减少，因为想象未来取决于语义记忆和情景记忆之间的相互作用。我们研究了哪种情景记忆细节类别（基于感知的还是基于概要的）与老年人的时间折扣有关。自传记忆中基于感知的细节更丰富的老年人表现出较低的时间折扣。此外，在一项探索性的神经解剖学分析中，折扣率和基于感知的细节都与内嗅皮质厚度相关。然而，在选择之前检索自传记忆并没有影响时间折扣，这表明在选择时激活情景记忆电路不足以改变老年人的折扣率。这些发现阐明了情景记忆在决策中的作用，这将为干预时间间隔选择提供信息。
