Cognitive mechanisms underlying subjective value of past and future events: Modeling systematic reversals of temporal value asymmetry.

Abstract

People discount both future outcomes that could happen and past outcomes that could have happened according to how far away they are in time. A common finding is that future outcomes are often preferred to past ones when the payoffs and temporal distance (how long ago/until they occur) are matched, referred to as temporal value asymmetry. In this article, we examine the consistency of this effect by examining the effect of manipulating the magnitude and delays of past and future payoffs on participants' choices and challenge the claim that differences in value are primarily due to differences in discounting rates for past and future events. We find reversals of the temporal value asymmetry when payoffs are low and when temporal distance is large, suggesting that people have different sensitivity to the magnitude of past and future payoffs. We show that these effects can be accommodated in a direct difference model of intertemporal choice but not in the most common discounting models (hyperboloid), suggesting that both temporal distance and payoff magnitude carry independent influences on the subjective value of past and future outcomes. Finally, we explore how these tendencies to represent past and future outcome values are related to one another and to individual differences in personality and psychological traits, showing how these measures cluster according to whether they measure processes related to past/ future events, payoffs/delays, and whether they are behavioral/self-report measures.