A General Model of Temporal Discounting Based on Two Value Systems
Samuel McClure, Stanford University
Samuel McClure received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Baylor College of Medicine in 2003. From there he completed postdoctoral training at Princeton University before moving to Stanford University as an assistant professor in 2007. McClure's work has combined behavioral, computation, and neuroimaging methods to investigate the neural basis of reward processing and decision making. More recently, he has focused on the neural mechanisms of delay discounting, describing the processes by which we evaluate goods that are available in the future.
Abstract: Intertemporal choices, which require selecting between rewards available at different points in time, are ubiquitous in everyday life. People and other animals apply a premium for acquiring rewards sooner, and temporal discount functions of numerous varieties have been used to characterize these preferences. This presentation aims to account for the tremendous variance in discount rates (both within and between subjects) observed in experiments on intertemporal choice. In the end, this presentation will argue that a two systems model provides a superior account of behavior than does the standard hyperbolic discounting model. Furthermore, the two systems model is grounded in terms of neural function and makes important new predictions that may inform interventions to affect discounting.