The Cognitive And Neural Mechanism Of The Regulatory Mode Effect On Intertemporal Choice

Intertemporal choice is that decision makers frequently balance the costs and benefits of decision making processes which occur at different times(Frederick et al., 2002). Intertemporal choice exists everywhere in our life, from minor things like personal savings, health, and work, to major events like national policies of education invest and environmental protection. The investigation of intertemporal choice in depth can help people make more rational judgment and decisions. With the development of psychology, economics and neuroscience, many researchers has made a lot of investigations which involved in the computational model, the neural mechanism as well as the factor that can influence people’s intertemporal preference in recent years. Peters et al. (2011) thought that we should explore the intertemporal choice from the status factors and the strait factors angles in the future research. From the trait perspective, many studies have showed that intertemporal choice can be influenced by impulsivity, self control, intelligence and time perspective, but we kown little about the link between intertemporal choice and regulatory mode. Combining the behavioral research and fMRI neuroimaging, the present study systemically investigated the cognitive processes and neural mechanisms of the effect of regulatory modes (assessment and locomotion) on intertemporal choice.Study I adopted behavior experiment to investigate the relationship between regulatory mode orientations and delay discounting. Results showed AUC was positively related with Assessment scores, whereas was negatively related with Locomotion scores; assessors showed smaller delay discounting rate than locomotors. These results suggested that individual differences in delay discounting can be predicted by people’s regulation mode. However, we found no evidence that can be used to explain the link between regulatory mode and intertemporal choice in present study.Study Ⅱ investigated the neural mechanisms of this effect using task fMRI. We found the ability of subjective value representation in mPFC was positively correlated with assessment scores, whereas negatively correlated with locomotion scores. Importantly, mediation analysis showed this ability in mPFC was a significant mediator between intertemporal choice and regulatory mode. This result indicated that the ability of subjective value representation in mPFC might be a neural mechanism in regulatory mode effect on intertemporal choice.In study Ⅲ,we used resting-state functional connectivity, to explore the effect of two regulatory mode orientations delay discounting. Neuroimaging results showed that d1PFC-mPFC functional coupling was negatively related with Assessment scores, but was positively related with Locomotion scores. Furthermore, mediation analysis found the effect of regulatory mode on intertemporal choice is mediated by d1PFC-mPFC functional connectivity. These results suggested that people’s regulatory mode orientation can predict delay discounting, which was supported by d1PFC-mPFC functional connectivity.Collectively, our findings indicated that:(1) delay discounting was negatively related with Assessment scores, whereas was positively related with Locomotion scores; assessors showed smaller delay discounting rate than locomotors. (2) The ability of subjective value representation in mPFCand the d1PFC-mPFC functional coupling might play an important mediate role in effect of regulatory mode orientation intertemporal choice. From the trait perspective, this study investigated the cognitive and neural mechanism of the regulatory mode effect on intertemporal choice, widening the study field of intertemporal choice and providing new evidence for its cognitive and neural mechanism, and this is of important scientific values for the intervention of delay discounting.