Links between autobiographical memory richness and temporal discounting in older adults.

ABSTRACT: When making choices between smaller, sooner rewards and larger, later ones, people tend to discount future outcomes. Individual differences in temporal discounting in older adults have been associated with episodic memory abilities and entorhinal cortical thickness. The cause of this association between better memory and more future-oriented choice remains unclear, however. One possibility is that people with perceptually richer recollections are more patient because they also imagine the future more vividly. Alternatively, perhaps people whose memories focus more on the meaning of events (i.e., are more "gist-based") show reduced temporal discounting, since imagining the future depends on interactions between semantic and episodic memory. We examined which categories of episodic details -

SUBMITTER: Lempert KM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7156676 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature