ReviewPsychonomic bulletin & review2016
Time discounting and time preference in animals: A critical review.
Review in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 53 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
53 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Dopaminergic modulation of reward discounting in healthy rats: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Psychopharmacology · 2021Pooled it
- Population geometries in frontal cortex coordinate value-based decisions.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Neuroeconomics and myopia prevention: A framework for public health intervention.Acta ophthalmologica · 2026Review
- Accumulation of virtual tokens towards a jackpot reward enhances performance and value encoding in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Article
- A hardwired neural circuit for temporal difference learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Article
- Measuring self-control in a wild songbird using a spatial discounting task.Animal cognition · 2024Article
- Behavioral Training in First-Generation Long-Tailed Macaques (Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2024Article
- Dynamic inconsistency in great apes.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Environmental enrichment promotes adaptive responding during tests of behavioral regulation in male heterogeneous stock rats.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Hungry pigeons prefer sooner rare food over later likely food or faster information.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Article
- Cognitive mechanisms of learning in sequential decision-making under uncertainty: an experimental and theoretical approach.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2024Article
- Using rodent data to elucidate dopaminergic mechanisms of ADHD: Implications for human personality.Personality neuroscience · 2024Review
- Distinct developmental trajectories for risky and impulsive decision-making in chimpanzees.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
- Overharvesting in human patch foraging reflects rational structure learning and adaptive planning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Automated pose estimation in primates.American journal of primatology · 2022Review
- OXTR Gene DNA Methylation Levels Are Associated with Discounting Behavior with Untrustworthy Proposers.Brain sciences · 2022Article
- Can we tackle climate change by behavioral hacking of the dopaminergic system?Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Animals are an important model for studies of impulsivity and self-control. Many studies have made use of the intertemporal choice task, which pits small rewards available sooner against larger rewards available later (typically several seconds), repeated over many trials. Preference for the sooner reward is often taken to indicate impulsivity and/or a failure of self-control. This review shows that very little evidence supports this assumption; on the contrary, ostensible discounting behavior may reflect a boundedly rational but not necessarily impulsive reward-maximizing strategy. Specifically, animals may discount weakly, or even adopt a long-term rate-maximizing strategy, but fail to fully incorporate postreward delays into their choices. This failure may reflect learning biases. Consequently, tasks that measure animal discounting may greatly overestimate the true discounting and may be confounded by processes unrelated to time preferences. If so, animals may be much more patient than is widely believed; human and animal intertemporal choices may reflect unrelated mental operations; and the shared hyperbolic shape of the human and animal discount curves, which is used to justify cross-species comparisons, may be coincidental. The discussion concludes with a consideration of alternative ways to measure self-control in animals.
Indexed as
Identifiers
26063653What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.