The role of cognitive resources in the valuation of near and far future events

People's behaviors often appear short-sighted, suggesting they overvalue the near future and undervalue the far future. In three experiments, the present research focussed on the role of cognitive resources in the valuation of near and distant future events. Experiment I tested a new discounting paradigm for use in the subsequent experiments. Experiments 2 and 3 used different manipulations (time pressure and a concurrent tone task) to restrict the cognitive resources of participants valuing a series of future events. In both experiments, this manipulation caused an increase in the valuation of far future events but not in the valuations of near future events. Implications of these findings for the role of cognitive resources in time discounting processes are briefly discussed. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science BN. All rights reserved.