Effects of episodic future thinking on time discounting across adulthood

Today’s older adults are living longer, and the tendency to devalue future outcomes (time discounting) negatively affects financial choices throughout these longer lifespans. Cueing episodic future thinking (EFT) by tagging inter-temporal choice trials with hypothetical future events reliably increases future-oriented choices in younger adults, but its effects in older adults are unclear. In a sample of 100 adults across the lifespan, we found that EFT-cueing trials led to more future-oriented choices in younger adults, consistent with the extant literature, no choice differences in middle-aged adults, and fewer future-oriented choices in older adults. These findings suggest that EFT-cueing may not be an effective strategy to promote savings for all ages. Our design used common events for all subjects which allowed us to examine the relationship between events, finding that across age, cueing with rare, positive, and intense events led to more present-oriented choices, but may have limited our power compared to personally-relevant events.