Here goes the lab’s first preprint-toot: Our work on appetitive cue exposure effects on temporal discounting (led by Kilian Knauth) is now out https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.21.517327v1

Exposure to appetitive cues might increase temporal discounting, but by what mechanism? Some have suggested this might be driven by such cues activating the reward circuit, but this was never tested directly.

Kilian directly tested this idea by combining fMRI with computational modeling (n=38). While exposure to appetitive cues robustly increased reward circuit activation, temporal discounting was unaffected.

Individual differences in neural reward effects were not reliably associated with individual differences in behavioral effect.

Taken together, reward circuit activation associated with appetitive cue exposure seems to be insufficient to drive increased temporal discounting.