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My paper on autobiographical memory and intertemporal choice is out now in Scientific Reports! A thread... https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63373-1
Do individual differences in how we decide about the future reflect individual differences in the contents of our memories? In a previous (yet-unpublished) study, we found that people with better episodic memory were more patient for future rewards: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/720250v2
But we thought we could learn more about the mechanism connecting episodic memory and future-oriented choice by looking at the kinds of details that people recalled from their own personal experiences. (There is a lot of variability in that in older adults.)
We found that older adults who recalled more "perception-based" episodic details (i.e. time, place, and perceptual details that suggest they are visualizing a specific scene) when describing their memories were more likely to select larger, later rewards.
More “gisty” episodic details, like event and emotion details, were not related to intertemporal choice. So perhaps people who visualize past scenes more clearly also visualize future scenes more clearly, and this helps them to be patient.
Having older adults recall those memories prior to making intertemporal choices did not nudge them to make more patient choices, though. (This is consistent w/ null results of episodic future thinking on intertemporal choice in older adults.)
There's some brain data here, too! Entorhinal cortical thickness is associated with both the propensity to wait for delayed rewards and perception-based details, so it may be a crucial neural substrate for linking memory and choice (more work needed, of course!).
I want to acknowledge all the great related work on this topic, and to thank my advisors and RAs. But most of all, I want to thank the participants! This was my first foray into research w/ older adults, and I learned so much by talking to them about their memories.
