A Review of Intertemporal Decision Making in Neuroscience and Psychology: Time Perception, Attentional Resources, and Emotion

Abstract

Intertemporal choices are very common in daily life, such as insurance investments, membership cards, and health behavior advocacy. Prior literature on intertemporal decision-making mainly focused on economics. Discounted utility model and hyperbolic model are used to describe people’s preference for intertemporal decisions, and discount rate k is the indicator of people’s patience. As the research turns to people’s behavioral and psychological mechanisms, the gain-loss asymmetry received attention. Researchers began to study the effects of differences in decision makers’ risk preferences, cognitive differences, attention allocation, and affect on intertemporal decision making. The paper reviews current research in intertemporal decision making from three dimensions: time perception, attentional resources, and affect, also emphasizes the studies using techniques such as fMRI and ERPs in neuroscience, providing a more comprehensive understanding of how the brain makes decisions. In addition, the paper takes the social attributes into account, fully considering the complexity of decision-makers. Future research could explore the effects of visual features on time perception and intertemporal decision making, such as color; people’s decision preferences in states of complex emotions and new emotions such as loneliness and FOMO; in-depth studies of brain decision-making mechanisms using techniques such as ERPs in neuroimaging.