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The medial temporal lobes are critical for reward‐based decision making under conditions that promote episodic future thinking
Author(s) -
Palombo Daniela J.,
Keane Margaret M.,
Verfaellie Mieke
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
hippocampus
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.767
H-Index - 155
eISSN - 1098-1063
pISSN - 1050-9631
DOI - 10.1002/hipo.22376
Subject(s) - psychology , neuroscience , episodic memory , cognitive psychology , temporal lobe , cognitive science , cognition , epilepsy
ABSTRACT In the present study, we investigated the effect of medial temporal lobe (MTL) damage on human decision making in the context of reward‐based intertemporal choice. During intertemporal choice, humans typically devalue (or discount) a future reward to account for its delayed arrival (e.g., preferring $30 now over $42 in 2 months), but this effect is attenuated when participants engage in episodic future thinking, i.e., project themselves into the future to imagine a specific event. We hypothesized that this attenuation would be selectively impaired in amnesic patients, who have deficits in episodic future thinking. Replicating previous work, in a standard intertemporal choice task, amnesic patients showed temporal discounting indices similar to healthy controls. Consistent with our hypothesis, while healthy controls demonstrated attenuated temporal discounting in a condition that required participants first to engage in episodic future thinking (e.g., to imagine spending $42 at a theatre in 2 months), amnesic patients failed to demonstrate this effect. Moreover, as expected, amnesic patients' narratives were less episodically rich than those of controls. These findings extend the range of tasks that are shown to be MTL dependent to include not only memory‐based decision‐making tasks but also future‐oriented ones. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.