title: Investigating intertemporal choice through experimental evolutionary robotics.
abstract: In intertemporal choices, subjects face a trade-off between value and delay: achieving the most valuable outcome requires a longer time, whereas the immediately available option is objectively poorer. Intertemporal choices are ubiquitous, and comparative studies reveal commonalities and differences across species: all species devalue future rewards as a function of delay (delay aversion), yet there is a lot of inter-specific variance in how rapidly such devaluation occurs. These differences are often interpreted in terms of ecological rationality, as depending on environmental factors (e.g., feeding ecology) and the physiological and morphological constraints of different species (e.g., metabolic rate). Evolutionary hypotheses, however, are hard to verify in vivo, since it is difficult to observe precisely enough real environments, not to mention ancestral ones. In this paper, we discuss the viability of an approach based on evolutionary robotics: in Study 1, we evolve robots without a metabolism in five different ecologies; in Study 2, we evolve metabolic robots (i.e., robots that consume energy over time) in three different ecologies. The intertemporal choices of the robots are analyzed both in their ecology and under laboratory conditions. Results confirm the generality of delay aversion and the usefulness of studying intertemporal choice through experimental evolutionary robotics.
authors.affiliation: Goal-Oriented Agents Lab (GOAL), ISTC-CNR, Roma, Italy. Electronic address: fabio.paglieri@istc.cnr.it.
authors.forename: Fabio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Paglieri
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Artificial Life and Robotics (LARAL), ISTC-CNR, Roma, Italy.
authors.forename: Domenico
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Parisi
authors.affiliation: Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems, School of Computing and Mathematics, University of Plymouth, UK.
authors.forename: Massimiliano
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Patacchiola
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Artificial Life and Robotics (LARAL), ISTC-CNR, Roma, Italy.
authors.forename: Giancarlo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Petrosino
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D002755:Choice Behavior; D012371:Robotics
keywords: Delay discounting; Ecological rationality; Evolutionary robotics; Intertemporal choice; Preferences; Spatial discounting