Under the mentorship of Dr. Joseph Kable and Dr. Karolina Lempert, I worked on a project to investigate the effectiveness of a behavioral memory-based manipulation on temporal discounting.

Temporal discounting refers to the reduction in the subjective value of delayed rewards when people make intertemporal choices (i.e., choices between smaller sooner and larger later rewards). For example, when confronted with a choice between $10 now and $20 in the future, the subjective value of $20 will be less than the actual dollar amount depending on the delay. The tendency toward temporal discounting varies between individuals and has been linked with real-world impulsive behaviors, such as addiction. Therefore, developing manipulations to reduce temporal discounting can have real-world significance.

Motivated by research showing that retrieving memories prior to making intertemporal choices can reduce temporal discounting, we asked if putting people in a “retrieval mode” would be sufficient to reduce their temporal discounting. We induced retrieval mode by showing people familiar images prior to intertemporal choices such as “Do you prefer $10 now or $30 in 1 week?” Our hypothesis was that participants would have lower temporal discounting rates for choices that were preceded by a familiar scene image compared to choices that were preceded by a novel scene image. To test this hypothesis, I prepared stimuli and programmed a task in Qualtrics that was then administered to an online sample of 100 participants through Amazon’s mechanical Turk. Before collecting data, I helped prepare a pre-registration of the study on the Open Science Framework website. inducing retrieval mode with familiar images did not reduce temporal discounting. The result showed that temporal discounting was increased on familiar scene trials, which was the opposite of our hypothesis.

The main limitation of the study was that we excluded more participants than we expected and ended up with only 32 participants in our final sample. Therefore, the first future step for the research is to replicate our finding in a larger sample. Nevertheless, the result is intriguing. I presented these data to the Kable Lab and had some interesting discussions about possible explanations and future experiments.