mp2: delay of gratification In this project, we will assess primates’ ability to resist the temptation of an immediate reward in order to receive a larger or better reward later on.
Data collection is open until August 2023 - Get in touch at [email protected] to get involved! Delay of gratification involves the ability to resist the temptation of an immediate reward in order to receive a larger or better reward at a later point in time. It is a type of self-regulation and is closely related to concepts such as patience, impulse control, self-control, and willpower. Delay of gratification is involved in a variety of adaptive decision-making processes (e.g. planning, foraging, risk taking) and has been linked to health as well as economic, social, and academic achievement in humans. Several tasks have been used to assess delay of gratification in the past; we decided to use the accumulation task (Beran, 2002) as our main task. In this task, a limited number of food rewards slowly accumulate until the subject takes them and stops the accumulation process. We chose this task because we can include a wide range of difficulty levels (by varying the speed of accumulation) to capture the variation we expect to be present across species and individuals, and because it is a relatively easy task to implement. We would also like to include a second task: the exchange task (see e.g. Pele et al., 2011). In this task, subjects are given a food item that they can later trade for a larger quantity. The level of difficulty is determined by how long subjects need to keep the food reward without eating it before they can exchange it.
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