Human beings are temporal animals. Our existence is dominated by one theme - time. Like other animals, our reproductive success depends on our ability to make decisions, and our ability to make decisions in turn depends on our ability to perceive time - to access the value of delayed outcomes.[1] However, unlike other animals, we have the capability to see rewards that are delayed far into the future.[2] In fact many of our choices only pay off after months, years, or even decades. [3]By contrast, our nearest evolutionary relatives, for instance, the cotton-top Tamarin monkey can't even wait eight seconds to triple the value of an immediately available food reward. [4]
Our powers for mental time traveling, or prospective thinking as scientists call it, is thought to be aided by the hippocampus and Para-hippocampal cortex of our brain, which allows us to run mental simulations to evaluate future pay offs.[5] But we must not only be able to see potential future pay-offs, we must also be able to connect those future rewards with the concrete behavioral responses needed to achieve them[6].
Throughout our day-to-day life we must continually and spontaneously remember to link our long term goals to our present behavior - correcting any conflicts between the two by either changing our present behavior or changing our long term goals.[7] Most importantly, optimal decision making requires the ability to overcome immediate temptations in the service of long term goals.[8] For instance, we must overcome the temptation to eat that sweet sweet cupcake in service of the long term goal of weight loss. This is the essence of intertemporal decision-making - decisions in all life domains, whether finance, work, education, or relationships that involve tradeoffs among outcomes at different points in time.[9] “We humans can care about, or at least are capable of caring about, cost and benefits that extends years or even decades in the future.[10]”
References
Namboodiri, Vijay MK, et al. "A general theory of intertemporal decision-making and the perception of time." Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience 8 (2014), 1. ↑
Berns, Gregory S., David Laibson, and George Loewenstein. "Intertemporal choice–toward an integrative framework." Trends in cognitive sciences 11.11 (2007): 482-488, 2. ↑
Peters, Jan, and Christian Büchel. "Episodic future thinking reduces reward delay discounting through an enhancement of prefrontal-mediotemporal interactions." Neuron 66.1 (2010): 138-148, 138. ↑
See Berns, supra note 2. ↑
See Peters, supra note 3, at 139. ↑
See Generally Sheeran, Paschal, Thomas L. Webb, and Peter M. Gollwitzer. "The interplay between goal intentions and implementation intentions." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 31.1 (2005): 87-98. (Talks about implementation intentions which specify “the behavior one will perform in the service of the goal and the situational context in which one will enact it (i.e., ‘If situation Y arises, then I will initiate goal-directed behavior Z!’)” ↑
Dixon, Matthew L., and Kalina Christoff. "The lateral prefrontal cortex and complex value-based learning and decision making." Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 45 (2014): 9-18. In pertinent part:
In many cases,a future reward is not present or even cued by the environmentand must be recalled from long-term memory to guide behavior.For example, while at home, a student may recall the mem-ory of a future desired outcome (e.g., obtaining an ‘A’ in physicsclass) and this may provide an overarching context that trigg-ers a set of studying rules that in turn guide a set of actions(e.g., pulling out the class textbook and highlighting importantpoints). ↑
Heatherton, Todd F., and Dylan D. Wagner. "Cognitive neuroscience of self-regulation failure." Trends in cognitive sciences 15.3 (2011): 132-139, 134. (“The ability to transcend immediate temptations in the service of long-term goals is a key aspect of self-regulation.”) ↑
id ↑
See Berns, supra note 2. ↑
