Dissociating the relationship between time perception and decisions to delay gratification.

Abstract

The ability to forgo an immediate reward in favor of a larger, later one is central to healthy decision-making--yet some people struggle to delay gratification. A prominent theory proposes that people with faster internal clocks experience delays as subjectively longer and more costly, leading them to discount future rewards more steeply. Here, we test this theory's central prediction by asking whether individual differences in time perception can explain individual differences in temporal decision-making. We recruited 226 participants to complete tasks measuring time perception and delay sensitivity across experiential and hypothetical decisions. We found no relationship between time perception and temporal decision-making. We also found that survey and task-based measures of temporal discounting are unrelated and that neither measure predicts real-world timing-related behaviors. Our findings indicate that time perception and temporal decision-making derive from dissociable cognitive processes and that standard laboratory measures of discounting have limited ecological validity. We suggest that foraging paradigms, which embed time-reward trade-offs in naturalistic behavioral contexts offer a promising path toward more ecologically valid and mechanistically tractable approaches to understanding how the brain trades off time and reward during decision-making.