Generalizability of time-based interventions: Effects of choice procedure and smaller-sooner delay

Travis R. Smith, Kelsey Panfil, Kimberly Kirkpatrick

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

Interventions exposing rats to delayed-reward contingencies attenuate suboptimal impulsive choices, a preference for a smaller-sooner (SS) over a larger-later (LL) reward. Interventions may potentially improve delay-tolerance, timing of delays, and/or discrimination of reward magnitudes. Generalization from the intervention to impulsive choice under different procedures can provide insights into the processes that underlie the intervention effects. Experiment 1 tested intervention effects on systematic-delay (SYS) and adjusting-delay (ADJ) procedures, predicting that intervention effects would be more effective on the SYS procedure with predictable delays. The ADJ procedure did not benefit significantly from intervention, but the SYS procedure, unexpectedly, showed greater impulsive choices following intervention. Experiment 2 tested whether short (5 s) SS intervention delays may have promoted greater impulsivity in the SYS impulsive choice procedure in Experiment 1. Short SS delays in choice and intervention procedures increased impulsive choices in comparison to longer (10 s) delays. Incongruent SS delays in the intervention/choice procedures resulted in negative intervention effects. The results suggest that short SS delays are detrimental to self-control and that specific temporal information generalizes from the intervention to the SYS choice task, but not the ADJ choice task.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number104584
JournalBehavioural Processes
Volume196
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2022
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Elsevier B.V.

Keywords

  • Delay discounting
  • Impulsive choice
  • Intervention
  • Rat
  • Timing

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