Intertemporal choice is vital to human survival and development. How to make an intertemporal choice is a compelling question facing scientists today. Mainstream theories of intertemporal choice hold that choices are based on a compensatory expectation-maximizing process. Some researchers, however, argued that intertemporal choice is based on a non-compensatory process, foregoing discouting and summing. People rely on only one (or a few) key dimension (s) rather than integrating information from all dimensions of an option for making a decision. To tackle this question and further our knowledge of the mechanism underlying human decision making, concrete and convincing evidence based on psychological process is required. Therefore, we designed and conducted a series of behavioral and neural experiments to systematically investigate the process of intertemporal choice. We organized and designed our experiments in line with the computation steps assumed by the expectation rule, that is, from the process of discouting process, to summing process, and then to maximizing overall values. It is our hope that these independent studies can help us to gradually understand the global process underlying intertemporal choice, thereby providing psychology- and neuroscience-based theoretical foundations for facilitating the practice of people's foresight and green awareness.
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