Deterioration of a part of the brain known as the medial temporal lobe can cause an older adult to make more impulsive decisions.
One decision-making process—temporal discounting—places a greater value on a smaller and immediate outcome while dismissing a better but delayed outcome: instant gratification, in other words.
Researchers at Penn’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center explored this cognition and found that individual differences in temporal discounting are driven by episodic memory function, and that a deteriorating medial temporal lobe may impact the ability to delay gratification.
In the paper, published in the journal Neuropsychologia, Penn Memory Center Clark Scholar Karolina Lempert finds how temporal discounting impacts decision-making for older adults living with normal cognition and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). She explored how, over time, the structure in the entorhinal cortex decreases and how that influences the capacity for older adults living with MCI to process and retain episodic memories. The entorhinal cortex is an area of the brain located in the medial temporal lobe and functions as a hub in a widespread network for memory, navigation, and the perception of time.
“Thinning of the entorhinal cortex has been linked to a lowered capacity and frequency to retain episodic memories,” Lempert says. “We showed that the ability to delay gratification is linked to memory ability as well as the structure of the entorhinal cortex. Atrophy of the entorhinal cortex leads to worse memory and, therefore, worse ability to delay gratification.”
This story is by Kamila Ahmad. Read more at Penn Memory Center.
