Purpose:

To test the usefulness of the delay-discounting task of Koffarnus and Bickel (2014) when substituting neutral stimuli for food.

Methodological design:

It is a cross-section instrumental study with a descriptive scope. The items were translated and back-translated, the image of two chocolate bars was produced, with a slogan that was changed from "would you rather have" to "would you rather eat" and a pilot test was carried out. Subsequently, it was applied to a sample of 191 participants of ages among 18 and 30 (M= 22.33, DE= 4.02) residents of Mexico City, of which 121 were women and 70 were men.

Results:

It was found that the participants had a tendency to discount more the delayed rewards . The discount rate showed a behavior similar to that proposed in the literature (k = .25, s= .24, R2 = .62; k = .014, s= .87, R2 = .90), which indicates that the task does allow identifying the tendency to discount rewards.

Research limitations:

The use of a single food stimulus was a limitation. So was the presence of a feeling of hunger among the participants, and the non-differentiation of sweet and salty stimuli as well. However, these did not prevent from obtaining a temporary discount measure according to the reports in the literature related.

Findings:

The task is capable of identifying the tendency to discount delayed rewards, in addition, it was possible to obtain the area under the curve values for both conditions, which makes it possible to establish that the task is adequate in order to obtain a measure of dd (delay discounting).

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