Examination of delay discounting with and without contingency descriptions

Document Type

Thesis

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Psychology

Degree

M.S. Applied Behavior Analysis

Date Completed

2022

First Committee Member

Bourret, Jason

Second Committee Member

Pinkston, Jonathan

Third Committee Member

Thompson, Rachel

Abstract

"Delay discounting is the degree to which individuals devalue delayed consequences. Previous researchers have commonly conducted delay discounting research with humans by arranging choices between immediately available, hypothetical monetary rewards or delayed, hypothetical monetary rewards. In the present research, we examined the degree to which real and hypothetical monetary rewards were discounted across delays ranging from 30 s, 15 s, 5 s, and no delay in a within-subjects design. Each participant experienced the following conditions: reinforcer delivery without contingency descriptions, reinforcer delivery with contingency descriptions, and contingency descriptions without reinforcer deliveries. An adjusting-amount procedure was used to estimate the value of real and hypothetical rewards at each delay. Area under the curve (AUC) was measured to summarize the indifference points. AUC values were generally lowest in the reinforcers only conditions, apart from one participant’s data. For most of the participants, the highest AUC values were obtained in the contingency descriptions only condition. These findings suggest that the use of verbal contingency descriptions may result in responding that is less sensitive to delay to reinforcement."

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