PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Samuel J. Gershman
AU  - Rahul Bhui
TI  - Rationally inattentive intertemporal choice
AID  - 10.1101/680652
DP  - 2019 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 680652
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/06/24/680652.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/06/24/680652.full
AB  - Discounting of future rewards is traditionally interpreted as evidence for an intrinsic preference in favor of sooner rewards. However, temporal discounting can also arise from internal uncertainty in value representations of future events, if one assumes that noisy mental simulations of the future are rationally combined with prior beliefs. Here, we further develop this idea by considering how simulation noise may be adaptively modulated by task demands, based on principles of rational inattention. We show how the optimal allocation of mental effort can give rise to well-known phenomena in intertemporal choice, such as the magnitude effect and the interaction between sign and magnitude effects. In a re-analysis of a large data set and in a new experiment, we reveal several behavioral signatures of this novel theoretical account, tying choice stochasticity to the magnitude effect. We conclude that some aspects of temporal discounting may result from a cognitively plausible adaptive response to the costs of information processing.