Schedule of Events | Symposia

Entorhinal cortex activation during precise temporal memory retrieval is associated with temporal discounting

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 30, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Chloe Ott¹, Federica Procida², Karolina Lempert¹; ¹Adelphi University, ²University "Gabriele d'Annunzio"

Previous studies have shown an association between entorhinal cortex (ERC) structural integrity and reduced temporal discounting (i.e., the tendency to prefer smaller, sooner rewards over larger, later rewards). However, the mechanism by which ERC supports more future-oriented choices is unclear. Given the finding that high temporal precision in memory for time was related to ERC activation in a previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study (Montchal et al. 2019), one possibility is that people who are more precise in recalling time information have lower temporal discounting rates. The current study aims to deduce whether ERC activation while retrieving accurate temporal memories is associated with temporal discounting. During fMRI scanning, participants (n = 24) watched an episode of a show they had never seen before. Later, they were asked to judge the time of occurrence of still-frames extracted from the episode on a timeline representing the movie duration. We ran a parametric modulation analysis to see where activity increased as a function of greater accuracy on the timeline task. Beta estimates for the accuracy regressor were extracted from left and right ERC. These activations were then correlated with participant’s discounting rates from a standard temporal discounting task. In preliminary analyses, increased activations in the right (r = -0.521; p = 0.009), and, to a lesser extent, left (r = -0.375; p = 0.071) ERC when retrieving accurate time memories were correlated with lower discounting rates. This suggests that people who engage ERC more when retrieving time information make more patient choices.

Topic Area: THINKING: Decision making