Delayed rewards lose their value for economic decisions and constitute weaker reinforcers for learning. Temporal discounting of reward value already occurs within a few seconds in animals, which allows investigations of the underlying neurophysiological mechanisms. However, it is difficult to relate these mechanisms to human discounting behavior, which is usually studied over days and months and may engage different brain processes. Our study aimed to bridge the gap by using very short delays and measuring human functional magnetic resonance responses in one of the key reward centers of the brain, the ventral striatum. We used psychometric methods to assess subjective timing and valuation of monetary rewards with delays of 4.0–13.5 s. We demonstrated hyperbolic and exponential decreases of striatal responses to reward predicting stimuli within this time range, irrespective of changes in reward rate. Lower reward magnitudes induced steeper behavioral and striatal discounting. By contrast, striatal responses following the delivery of reward reflected the uncertainty in subjective timing associated with delayed rewards rather than value discounting. These data suggest that delays of a few seconds affect the neural processing of predicted reward value in the ventral striatum and engage the temporal sensitivity of reward responses. Comparisons with electrophysiological animal data suggest that ventral striatal reward discounting may involve dopaminergic and orbitofrontal inputs.

Monetary rewards are uniquely human. Because money is easy to quantify and present visually, it is the reward of choice for most fMRI studies, even though it cannot be handed over to participants inside the scanner. A typical fMRI study requires hundreds of trials and thus small amounts of monetary rewards per trial (e.g. 5p) if all trials are to be treated equally. However, small payoffs can have detrimental effects on performance due to their limited buying power. Hypothetical monetary rewards can overcome the limitations of smaller monetary rewards but it is less well known whether predictors of hypothetical rewards activate reward regions. In two experiments, visual stimuli were associated with hypothetical monetary rewards. In Experiment 1, we used stimuli predicting either visually presented or imagined hypothetical monetary rewards, together with non-rewarding control pictures. Activations to reward predictive stimuli occurred in reward regions, namely the medial orbitofrontal cortex and midbrain. In Experiment 2, we parametrically varied the amount of visually presented hypothetical monetary reward keeping constant the amount of actually received reward. Graded activation in midbrain was observed to stimuli predicting increasing hypothetical rewards. The results demonstrate the efficacy of using hypothetical monetary rewards in fMRI studies.