Melanie Tschernegg, Belinda Pletzer, Philipp Schwartenbeck, Philipp Ludersdorfer, Uta Hoffmann, Martin Kronbichler
Abstract
Time-stable personality traits, such as impulsivity and its relationship with functional and structural brain alterations, have gained much attention in the recent literature. Evidence from functional neuroimaging data implies an association between impulsivity and cortical as well as subcortical areas of the reward system. Discounting future rewards during impulsive decisions can be related to activation in the orbitofrontal cortex and striatum. Cortical structural changes in prefrontal regions have been found for introspective impulsivity measures. The present study focuses on brain regions associated with delay discounting to investigate structural manifestations of trait impulsivity. To test this, seventy subjects underwent structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) followed by a behavioral delay discounting task outside of the scanner to measure impulsivity with questions like: "Would you like to have 3€ immediately or 10€ in 5 days?". The amount of smaller-but-sooner decisions was calculated and used as a measure of behavioral impulsivity. Furthermore, we estimated subject's individual delay discounting parameter K reflecting the tendency to discount future rewards. Behaviorally, we found strong evidence in favor of a discounting utility model compared to a standard hyperbolic model of choice valuation. Neuronally, we focused on cortical and subcortical brain structure and investigated the association of behavioral impulsivity with delay discounting tendencies and gray matter volume. Voxel-based morphometric analyses showed positive correlations between delay discounting and gray matter volume in the striatum. Additional analyses using Freesurfer provided evidence for a positive correlation between delay discounting and gray matter volume of the caudate. Taken together, our study provides strong evidence for a structural manifestation of time-stable trait impulsivity in the human brain.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 4. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 17 July 2015.
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Altmetric has tracked 24,657,405 research outputs across all sources so far. This one has received more attention than most of these and is in the 67th percentile.
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