ACTA PSYCHOL SIN DOI : 10.3724/SP.J.1041.2014.001 © CNKI All rights reserved. This work was supported by The Ministry of education of Humanities and Social Science Youth Foundation (Grant No. 10YJCXLX056), Humanities and Social Sci- ence Key Project of the Education Department of Henan Province (Grant No. 2013-ZD-090), Scientific Research Foundation of Henan University (Grant No. 2012YBRW019), and Youth Foundation of Henan University College of Education Science (Grant No. 2012-JKJJ-03). * Corresponding author: Zhao Guoxiang, E-mail address: zhaogx@henu.edu.cn; Li Hong, E-mail address: lihong@lnnu.edu.cn Original Chinese article published in ACTA PSYCHOL SIN, 2014, Vol 46, No.2; Translated by Lu Hai. Citation: SUO T, ZHANG F, ZHAO G, et al. The Influence of Time Perception Difference on Intertemporal Choice. Acta Psychologica Sinica. 2014, 46(1): 165–173. The Influence of Time Perception Difference on Intertemporal Choice SUO Tao 1 , ZHANG Feng 1 , ZHAO Guoxiang 1,* , LI Hong 2,* 1 Institute of Psychology & Behavior, College of Education and Science, Henan University, Kaifeng 475004, China 2 College of Psychology, Liaoning Normal University, Dalian 116029, China Abstract: Intertemporal choice refers to decisions involving tradeoffs among costs and benefits occurring at differ- ent points in time. Despite a large number of studies have shown that impulsive behavior is closely related to sub- jective experience of time, but the relationship between impulsive behavior and perception of time is still controversial in intertemporal choices. From the perspective of personality differences, using a simple intertemporal choice task, this study investigated the differences in behavioral responses between two groups who had different tendencies of time perception (those who tended to overestimate time or underestimate time) in intertemporal choice to explore the role of time perception on intertemporal choice. In the present study, 32 participants who overestimated time (18 males and 14 females, average age = 20.36 ± 1.25 years) and 32 participants who underestimate time (15 male and 17 females, average age = 20.64 ± 1.98 years) were selected by using a time-production task from 120 volunteers recruited from some universities in China. They were asked to engage in a simple intertemporal choice task, in which, they were forced to make choices between two amounts of money attained in different delay time, and moreover, the difficulty of the intertemporal choice task was also manipulated through different amounts of money in options. The participants in the experiment were all right-hand, had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and had no neurological or psychological disorders. Each par- ticipant signed a consent form prior to the experiments and was paid after the experiment, according to their per- formance. The study was approved by the local academic committee. The results indicated that, (1) regardless of the difficulty of choice task, compared to the group who tended to underestimate time, the group who tended to overestimate time preferred to smaller-immediate rewards. (2) there is no significant difference in reaction time of intertemporal choice between the group who tended to overestimate time and the group who tended to underestimate time; and the reaction time of the group who tended to overesti- mate time was not affected by difficulty of choice task, while the reaction time of the group who tended to overes- timate time in easy choice task was significantly longer than that in difficult task. In conclusion, the present study suggested that time perception played an important role in intertemporal deci- sion-making. Individuals who tended to overestimation of time may lead to overestimation of the cost of revenue, which would result in his/her impulsive choices in intertemporal choices Keywords: Intertemporal Choice; Time Perception; Tendency to Overestimate Time; Tendency to Underestimate Time 1 Introduction Intertemporal choice refers to decisions involving tradeoffs among costs and benefits occurring at different points in time (Frederick, Loewenstein, & Donoghue, 2002; Liang & Liu, 2011; Sun, 2011). The mostly used paradigm by psy- chologists and behavioral economists for studies on these decisions is an intertemporal choice task, that is to say, par- ticipants are asked to make a choice between two alternative options with different values and reward durations, for in- stance, “Do you want to get 10 yuan right away, or 20 yuan 1 week later?” In this choice process, reward duration, as a cost to trade off the benefits, significantly influences the individual choice tendency of decision-making. The subjec- tive value of reward decreases with the increase of the re- ward duration and the delay of benefits (this phenomenon has been known as delay discounting or time discounting), and thus individuals tend to prefer the beneficial option with a more immediate reward. Although a large number of stud- ies (Kalenscher & Pennartz, 2008) have investigated the variation tendency of subjective value over time, a variety of mathematical models and theories have been proposed to describe and explain this phenomenon, respectively. How- ever, all of these models and theories fail to fully explain the various anomalies in delay discounting. Recently, Kim and Zauberman (2009a) proposed a perceived-time-based model, trying to explain the delay discounting in intertemporal de- cision-making. They believed that most previous studies, which mainly investigated the variation of subjective value over time from the perspective of value to explain the delay discounting, disregarding the other side of this problem, namely, the influences of time perception on the delayed